> Boeing is a major defense contractor, and the move will put executives close to Pentagon leaders.
According to the book Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison the entire decline of Boeing started when they moved their HQ from Seattle to Chicago and deprioritized engineering, quality and safety.
Boeing is at the end stage of the feed back loop where regulatory failures lead to monopolies and vice versa.
The regulatory failures usually come first, either a failure of antitrust (they're allowed to buy up the competition) or a regulatory environment that itself puts the competition out of business. Then you have a consolidated market.
Monopolies are like cancer. They metastasize. If you didn't have regulations that keep upstart competitors out of the market before, the incumbents will welcome them if not actively lobby in favor of them. And then you're stuck with them. They're too big to fail. If you had 10 other domestic airline companies and one of them was screwing up, they'd not only have to contend with customers going somewhere else, the government could actually punish them. Whereas if there's only one, what are you going to do? Bankrupt the only domestic supplier? And they know it.
I remember when they moved to Chicago the argument was to be closer to their Airline customers. They wanted to shift from a focus on building planes to a focus on selling planes.
Now they can't even sell planes so their new focus is corruption I guess. The good news for them is that business is booming.
There is something to be said about having an airplane company choosing to site executives someplace specific at all, over, you know, using airplanes to get them places. It only takes 5 hours to get across the entire continental US.
Well, presumably the executives would like to see their families at least once a day. And the people in Washington you meet with prefer to do so in their offices.
If you're wondering - hey, that sounds terrible, why doesn't the FAA do anything about it? Answer, because it practically can't without maybe a 10x or more budget boost that's practically impossible.
Why? Copying from another comment I made on this thread:
(Caution, my thoughts are a bit rambly and scattered. It's been a while since I studied this in detail for a class where I had deep divided into the max 8 crash and FAA's lapse, so the details are a bit foggy.)
The short answer is that unfortunately it's practically almost impossible to do this any other way, short of massively increasing funding for the FAA (which is presumably politically not going to be done.)
The long answer is, anyone with expertise ends up going to work at an aerospace company where they are properly compensated. You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc. (This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries where you need a high level of technical expertise.) And if you think it should be easily doable... here's a thought experiment. Say 20 people in boeing know about MCAS (pre crashes and their publicity). If even only 2 FAA employees need to be technically sound in their knowledge of such a niche system, that's about 10% of how many boeing employees know about it.
Now if you extrapolate that to all systems and all employees across multiple companies... you see why it's an issue for one agencies to have such deep knowledge about everything. (And this isn't even considering what happens when people quit etc.)
Because of this, the most obvious answer to "how does the FAA, without much engineers, decide what's safe or not", is to ask the experts and just have them certify stuff, well, not under oath, but as close to that as possible.
That's trivial to solve and you are attacking the problem from wrong direction. Simple answer is: long term punishment for bad behavior. Company, executives, and indirectly but intensively shareholders. Make it an example, and make it fucking loud example for everybody.
Anybody wanting a stable long term cash flows will align, and do their best to fix this. This is how banks were put in line after 2008, very effectively. No western bank knowingly circumvents new related regulations, punishments would be absolutely crushing and never worth the risk. Those people up there are not stupid, this is how calculus for criminals works.
> If you're wondering - hey, that sounds terrible, why doesn't the FAA do anything about it? Answer, because it practically can't without maybe a 10x or more budget boost that's practically impossible.
You're correct in that the FAA can't (or at least, it would be wildly impractical) have a staff of in-house experts that equal or exceed the experience of the manufacturer engineers on every possible topic.
But, that's not necessary to enforce a process of quality. It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality, including which experts need to sign off on what. Then the FAA needs to hold the engineers who sign off professionally responsible and their managment legally liable if any circumvention is discovered down the line.
>But, that's not necessary to enforce a process of quality. It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality, including which experts need to sign off on what. Then the FAA needs to hold the engineers who sign off professionally responsible and their managment legally liable if any circumvention is discovered down the line.
Having seen how quality processes work, it's really not a substitute for competent oversight. You can have a crap design and get all the paperwork is completely 100% in order, in fact the paperwork then makes it a lot more time consuming and expensive to fix the design!
> It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality
You have no ideea.
It's sooo extremely easy to fake everything! I'm working with ISO15189 right now. I could just fill paperwork saying I did things that I didn't really do. Nobody could tell the difference. Sometimes there's an audit. It's announced months in advance and they only just look at the paperwork. I'm the only one here that knows the analysers have trace logs and how do get/print them. Some of those logs are just CSV text files. I could fake those too.
According to ISO, the company should do an audit every year. Last one was 3 years ago, but I'm certain that someone wrote down every year that they did it.
The MCAS system is probably not the best example here because it doesn’t take expert knowledge on MCAS to catch lack of redundancy and poor documentation in the design of a system so critical. This one of the reasons patterns, processes and standards exist. I did this for a living and consulted for many companies in processes my team had no domain experience with, still we were able to catch process gaps. MCAS IMO was a flaw easy to flag for any competent auditor.
Do you know how it works in other places where planes get built, eg Europe, Brazil? The incumbents on both sides will always tell you that there's no other way things could be done. Looking at how they get done elsewhere seems like a good sanity check.
> This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries
Most of us work in tech. Imagine an auditor coming in and trying to sort out if one of the most complex systems at your company is "safe." What's safe? Every previously known failure mode and every new one you're going to be blamed for when it happens.
It's not about declaring things to be safe. It's about having documented and adhered to processes that show safety is taken seriously at every point in the design, manufacture and maintenance of safety critical systems.
Yeah, but security industry is mostly a joke full of fraudsters. There are parts of it that work well, but most of it is theater and not that much competence.
Which is fine for low states they deal with and not fine with planes.
Having been in both in software/IT capacities, having done PCI certified software, medical device software (requiring FDA approval), no. Not even close.
MAYBE, MAYBE the insurance company assessments/audits are kind of related to what you are talking about. But not really. But not the FAA ones. They are such a different beast with so much brain power involved along with people with a combined centuries of experience in this stuff, it's hard to explain without being around it.
I thought FDA regulated device software certification was hard, PCI certification just annoying. FAA certification is on another level from those.
There's so many moving parts to aircraft certification honestly I was surprised when a new design would get type design certification. Which is why Boeing tries to do things like shoehorn in a new airplane under an older airplane type design (MAX) so they don't have to get a whole new type design approved.
It is typical for aerospace companies to have in-house "FAA delegates" who function in the stead of direct FAA reviewers, and it looks like all that is going on here is the FAA is allowing Boeing to go back to using their own internal delegates (every other week!).
I know a couple of people through my professional network who hold this title and what I've gathered is that delegates have a lot of autonomy and authority. And Boeing does organize the company and even its information systems to practically treat them as FAA regulators.
And, FWIW, the type of person who ends up self-selecting into this kind of work are serious people who deeply care about airline safety. It is a rather thankless job with a lot of onerous, tedious paperwork that is not very sexy.
Was at a different aerospace company. Our internal people were really good. And by paperwork FYI they generated 1-2 filing cabinets worth of documentation per tail number of notes/quality checks/etc.
They could have IT set legal hold on email accounts, filesystems, PLM/MLM, etc and only us in IT and them knew, not even higher management. They could scrap $20,000 parts. It's also a small world, so chances are your internal people worked with the FAA person (who could be a consultant or full time FAA employee) at a past job so people know if trust levels are warranted.
There's also a whole other layer of oversite people might not realize. The company's insurance company (think Lloyd’s). They will have their own people who will come do on sites as well and do pretty intensive audits of everything from engineering through production.
Which defeats the purpose of adversarial review by a regulator. When your paycheck is signed by who you are regulating, you absolutely cannot force handling of what your employer doesn't want to handle. And seeing as FAA has had reciprocity in terms of certification with other countries (which if other countries were smart, they'd cease recognizing until the U.S. gets their shit straight), it's really an egregious abdication of responsibility on the FAA's part.
(Caution, my thoughts are a bit rambly and scattered. It's been a while since I studied this in detail for a class where I had deep divided into the max 8 crash and FAA's lapse, so my memory is a bit foggy.)
The short answer is that unfortunately it's practically almost impossible to do this any other way, short of massively increasing funding for the FAA (which is presumably politically not going to be done.)
The long answer is, anyone with expertise ends up going to work at an aerospace company where they are properly compensated. You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc. (This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries where you need a high level of technical expertise.) And if you think it should be easily doable... here's a thought experiment. Say 20 people in boeing know about MCAS (pre crashes and their publicity). If even only 2 FAA employees need to be technically sound in their knowledge of such a niche system, that's about 10% of how many boeing employees know about it.
Now if you extrapolate that to all systems and all employees across multiple companies... you see why it's an issue for one agencies to have such deep knowledge about everything. (And this isn't even considering what happens when people quit etc.)
Because of this, the most obvious answer to "how does the FAA, without much engineers, decide what's safe or not", is to ask the experts and just have them certify stuff, well, not under oath, but as close to that as possible.
>You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc.
Incorrect. The engineers acting as FAA delegates are paid by Boeing, not the FAA. Toxic incentive. Stop shining that apple Leroy, plane needs to get shipped, and bossman is getting testy.
As far as your arguments on the information propagation front go, MCAS was deliberately designed against industry best practices and perception managed from regulators to do everything possible to avoid simulator training. Stop assuming good faith. This was malice. Malice that could only be executed upon because Boeing deliberately appointed junior engineers who didn't know the right questions to ask to FAA delegate positions.
I will not buy that delegating to the company is fine. The only people who benefit from that are the companies. I don't give a damn about the convenience to someone incentivized to go and industrially produce the least safe air transport product they can get away with. I care about the public's safety given I already know the market selects for incentive setters that flirt with risk in dangerous ways. And yes, that means we, the public, should damn well pay for that regulatory edifice. Especially if the rest of the world will treat FAA certification with reciprocity.
I'm afraid you're mostly preaching to the choir. My comment was to show how the real world issues develop ("How can the FAA trust Boeing to self audit after all that?!?" - because there's no other true option without major org changes) and how it's more complex than what meets the eye, not trying to justify status quo. I'm a very much pro safety guy who wants to do much more for aviation safety than just spread awareness on HN.
Btw for context, back in the 90s, a senior FAA official (I think a Director) had said something along the lines of “The FAA does not and cannot check everything, we just see that companies are doing their tests.”
> >You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc.
> Incorrect. The engineers acting as FAA delegates are paid by Boeing, not the FAA. Toxic incentive. Stop shining that apple Leroy, plane needs to get shipped, and bossman is getting testy.
I wasn't talking about who gets paid by whom. I meant whether the FAA is putting out openings for regulatory/engineering people, and what kind of people Boeing is hiring.
> MCAS was deliberately designed against industry best practices and perception managed from regulators to do everything possible to avoid simulator training. Stop assuming good faith.
I never said Boeing was in good faith. My report (based off the excellent NTSB/DOT report significantly, if anyone wants to delve in depth) was pretty much about that.
> I will not buy that delegating to the company is fine. The only people who benefit from that are the companies. I don't give a damn about the convenience to someone incentivized to go and industrially produce the least safe air transport product they can get away with. I care about the public's safety given I already know the market selects for incentive setters that flirt with risk in dangerous ways. And yes, that means we, the public, should damn well pay for that regulatory edifice. Especially if the rest of the world will treat FAA certification with reciprocity.
I fully agree. Got a better solution/alternative in mind that's feasible?
(Disclaimer, I'm not from the US if that is of any importance.)
You are talking about type certification which is a different certification/process way prior to this. This is talking about 'certificate of airworthiness' for a specific tail number. This is confirmation that the aircraft/tail number was built to type design. It has nothing to do with defining/certifying type design.
The FAA cert of airworthiness just confirms that this tail number was build exactly to type design, or, if required, anything that didn't went through non-conformance (say someone accidentally drilled a hole in the wrong spot and engineers had to decide if that compromised type design, mitigate it if needed, document it, and include documentation on all that with the tail number). There is no malice here this position/certification doesn't do what you seem to think it does.
You salary concern is wrong too. Aviation is a small world. The QA person has to be approved by the FAA to have a job. Boeing can threaten a paycheck, the FAA a career. Boeing is also Union in Seattle.
But again you should not be asking questions at this level just confirming the tail number was manufactured exactly to type design. You should be doing type design checks, that were approved as part of the type design process, and signed off and approved by the FAA. If the system requires someone to be an aerospace engineer level asking smart question during this phase, the entire FAA system failed and it wouldn't matter if FAA was on site or not. This is 1-2 filing cabinets worth of documentation that checks were performed and everything conformed to type. Documenting/verifying every part's serialized number in case of grounding/recall. That assemblies were assembled in the type design specified order, not the faster way Bob on the floor came up with (I think this was the problem with the doors, contractors not doing to type design and type design not requiring auditing in a way that caught that). Stuff like that.
Iffy by the headline, but the every-other-week model doesn't sound absolutely the worst. I don't have a great read on if it's a bad idea or not though.
So, Kelly Ortberg currently leading Boeing. Had family members who worked with him directly. He’s a very solid guy, good choice on Boeing’s part. Don’t know if they’re cutting corners to protect jobs and suckle the Trump admin, but that doesn’t seem characteristic of Kelly. My completely anecdotal take.
"“If something requires us to cease production, we will do that:” FAA -- "The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is considering whether to suspend the Production Certificate of Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) if it’s not satisfied changes to its safety culture are sufficient, LNA has learned."": https://old.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1bj6jsh/if_somethi... (From March 2024, old.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1bj6jsh/if_something_requires_us_to_cease_production_we/)
Do the Europeans still allow their aerospace companies to bribe/kickback to win contracts? I know that was allowed a decade ago.
I know multiple nations fleets (not at the airbus/boeing level) were chosen based on kickbacks. I know we were the originally winning bid, but that it was not extended to us because we wouldn't do kickbacks (they are illegal for US companies but at the time not for Europeans). Personally I'd rather the fly on the best aircraft not the one that inflated the price a half million per plane and sent those extra millions back to the government officials the picked the airframe.
The headline might as well be FAA decides not to do literally their job. Again.
A more charitable explanation is that their resources are more limited than the mess Boeing have created and they can't be everywhere at once. The idea that boeing have earned back trust is laughable to me.
Ot but mentour pilot on youtube does an excellent job of explaining how insanely safety focused the airline industry is and has plenty of boeing analysis as well.
This is a legitimate question we should be asking every single one of his hardcore supporters. Because they clearly consider him to be the only trusted authority; anyone who challenges him is clearly lying and out to get him.
I don't think this is representative of what's going on inside their heads. For sure it's the conclusion anyone applying critical thinking would come to, but that's not what's actually happening. What I hear when I ask is things like "oh I don't really like him myself, but he sure told them what's what" or "I think he's an idiot, but 100% better than those liberal criminals". In summary, the fact that Trump is a buffoon is fully accepted by most supporters, but for various reasons they prefer that to the alternative (that they perceive is available).
on the bright side, the next phone which gets sucked out of a mis-installed door will get even bigger publicity if it survives intact like the last one
"United will replace planes at Guam hub, upgrade lobby; same-day connections from Saipan to Hawaii starts Dec. 1": https://www.guampdn.com/news/united-will-replace-planes-at-g... (www.guampdn.com/news/united-will-replace-planes-at-guam-hub-upgrade-lobby-same-day-connections-from-saipan-to/article_ab170120-872b-4c31-81de-83ea44357bce.html); https://archive.is/S47A0
Moving their HQ from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia (next to Washington DC) to prioritize lobbying and access sounds like it helped! https://www.npr.org/2022/05/05/1096961418/boeing-moving-head...
> Boeing is a major defense contractor, and the move will put executives close to Pentagon leaders.
According to the book Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison the entire decline of Boeing started when they moved their HQ from Seattle to Chicago and deprioritized engineering, quality and safety.
Boeing is at the end stage of the feed back loop where regulatory failures lead to monopolies and vice versa.
The regulatory failures usually come first, either a failure of antitrust (they're allowed to buy up the competition) or a regulatory environment that itself puts the competition out of business. Then you have a consolidated market.
Monopolies are like cancer. They metastasize. If you didn't have regulations that keep upstart competitors out of the market before, the incumbents will welcome them if not actively lobby in favor of them. And then you're stuck with them. They're too big to fail. If you had 10 other domestic airline companies and one of them was screwing up, they'd not only have to contend with customers going somewhere else, the government could actually punish them. Whereas if there's only one, what are you going to do? Bankrupt the only domestic supplier? And they know it.
The only way out of it is to restore competition.
I remember when they moved to Chicago the argument was to be closer to their Airline customers. They wanted to shift from a focus on building planes to a focus on selling planes.
Now they can't even sell planes so their new focus is corruption I guess. The good news for them is that business is booming.
Government money will never run away.
Ah, It’s not so easy to un-McDonnell this Douglas.
There is something to be said about having an airplane company choosing to site executives someplace specific at all, over, you know, using airplanes to get them places. It only takes 5 hours to get across the entire continental US.
Well, presumably the executives would like to see their families at least once a day. And the people in Washington you meet with prefer to do so in their offices.
If you're wondering - hey, that sounds terrible, why doesn't the FAA do anything about it? Answer, because it practically can't without maybe a 10x or more budget boost that's practically impossible.
Why? Copying from another comment I made on this thread:
(Caution, my thoughts are a bit rambly and scattered. It's been a while since I studied this in detail for a class where I had deep divided into the max 8 crash and FAA's lapse, so the details are a bit foggy.)
The short answer is that unfortunately it's practically almost impossible to do this any other way, short of massively increasing funding for the FAA (which is presumably politically not going to be done.)
The long answer is, anyone with expertise ends up going to work at an aerospace company where they are properly compensated. You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc. (This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries where you need a high level of technical expertise.) And if you think it should be easily doable... here's a thought experiment. Say 20 people in boeing know about MCAS (pre crashes and their publicity). If even only 2 FAA employees need to be technically sound in their knowledge of such a niche system, that's about 10% of how many boeing employees know about it.
Now if you extrapolate that to all systems and all employees across multiple companies... you see why it's an issue for one agencies to have such deep knowledge about everything. (And this isn't even considering what happens when people quit etc.)
Because of this, the most obvious answer to "how does the FAA, without much engineers, decide what's safe or not", is to ask the experts and just have them certify stuff, well, not under oath, but as close to that as possible.
That's trivial to solve and you are attacking the problem from wrong direction. Simple answer is: long term punishment for bad behavior. Company, executives, and indirectly but intensively shareholders. Make it an example, and make it fucking loud example for everybody.
Anybody wanting a stable long term cash flows will align, and do their best to fix this. This is how banks were put in line after 2008, very effectively. No western bank knowingly circumvents new related regulations, punishments would be absolutely crushing and never worth the risk. Those people up there are not stupid, this is how calculus for criminals works.
> If you're wondering - hey, that sounds terrible, why doesn't the FAA do anything about it? Answer, because it practically can't without maybe a 10x or more budget boost that's practically impossible.
You're correct in that the FAA can't (or at least, it would be wildly impractical) have a staff of in-house experts that equal or exceed the experience of the manufacturer engineers on every possible topic.
But, that's not necessary to enforce a process of quality. It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality, including which experts need to sign off on what. Then the FAA needs to hold the engineers who sign off professionally responsible and their managment legally liable if any circumvention is discovered down the line.
>But, that's not necessary to enforce a process of quality. It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality, including which experts need to sign off on what. Then the FAA needs to hold the engineers who sign off professionally responsible and their managment legally liable if any circumvention is discovered down the line.
Having seen how quality processes work, it's really not a substitute for competent oversight. You can have a crap design and get all the paperwork is completely 100% in order, in fact the paperwork then makes it a lot more time consuming and expensive to fix the design!
> It can be done by enforcing that the company must establish and document the processes to ensure quality
You have no ideea.
It's sooo extremely easy to fake everything! I'm working with ISO15189 right now. I could just fill paperwork saying I did things that I didn't really do. Nobody could tell the difference. Sometimes there's an audit. It's announced months in advance and they only just look at the paperwork. I'm the only one here that knows the analysers have trace logs and how do get/print them. Some of those logs are just CSV text files. I could fake those too.
According to ISO, the company should do an audit every year. Last one was 3 years ago, but I'm certain that someone wrote down every year that they did it.
The MCAS system is probably not the best example here because it doesn’t take expert knowledge on MCAS to catch lack of redundancy and poor documentation in the design of a system so critical. This one of the reasons patterns, processes and standards exist. I did this for a living and consulted for many companies in processes my team had no domain experience with, still we were able to catch process gaps. MCAS IMO was a flaw easy to flag for any competent auditor.
Do you know how it works in other places where planes get built, eg Europe, Brazil? The incumbents on both sides will always tell you that there's no other way things could be done. Looking at how they get done elsewhere seems like a good sanity check.
> This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries
Most of us work in tech. Imagine an auditor coming in and trying to sort out if one of the most complex systems at your company is "safe." What's safe? Every previously known failure mode and every new one you're going to be blamed for when it happens.
It's not about declaring things to be safe. It's about having documented and adhered to processes that show safety is taken seriously at every point in the design, manufacture and maintenance of safety critical systems.
That's literally the security industry and third party security assessments are routine in tech.
Yeah, but security industry is mostly a joke full of fraudsters. There are parts of it that work well, but most of it is theater and not that much competence.
Which is fine for low states they deal with and not fine with planes.
Having been in both in software/IT capacities, having done PCI certified software, medical device software (requiring FDA approval), no. Not even close.
MAYBE, MAYBE the insurance company assessments/audits are kind of related to what you are talking about. But not really. But not the FAA ones. They are such a different beast with so much brain power involved along with people with a combined centuries of experience in this stuff, it's hard to explain without being around it.
I thought FDA regulated device software certification was hard, PCI certification just annoying. FAA certification is on another level from those.
There's so many moving parts to aircraft certification honestly I was surprised when a new design would get type design certification. Which is why Boeing tries to do things like shoehorn in a new airplane under an older airplane type design (MAX) so they don't have to get a whole new type design approved.
So Boeing can do something the US government can't do? I don't buy that argument.
how long ago did this self-certifying practice start?
how much smaller was Boeing (and the whole aviation industry) back then?
Unit membership for manufacturing started with the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, but I’m not sure how involved or hands-off it was at the time.
This article seems a bit light on details, but a little more at the FAA website:
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-statement-boeing-airworthin...
https://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/designees_...
It is typical for aerospace companies to have in-house "FAA delegates" who function in the stead of direct FAA reviewers, and it looks like all that is going on here is the FAA is allowing Boeing to go back to using their own internal delegates (every other week!).
I know a couple of people through my professional network who hold this title and what I've gathered is that delegates have a lot of autonomy and authority. And Boeing does organize the company and even its information systems to practically treat them as FAA regulators.
And, FWIW, the type of person who ends up self-selecting into this kind of work are serious people who deeply care about airline safety. It is a rather thankless job with a lot of onerous, tedious paperwork that is not very sexy.
Was at a different aerospace company. Our internal people were really good. And by paperwork FYI they generated 1-2 filing cabinets worth of documentation per tail number of notes/quality checks/etc.
They could have IT set legal hold on email accounts, filesystems, PLM/MLM, etc and only us in IT and them knew, not even higher management. They could scrap $20,000 parts. It's also a small world, so chances are your internal people worked with the FAA person (who could be a consultant or full time FAA employee) at a past job so people know if trust levels are warranted.
There's also a whole other layer of oversite people might not realize. The company's insurance company (think Lloyd’s). They will have their own people who will come do on sites as well and do pretty intensive audits of everything from engineering through production.
Which defeats the purpose of adversarial review by a regulator. When your paycheck is signed by who you are regulating, you absolutely cannot force handling of what your employer doesn't want to handle. And seeing as FAA has had reciprocity in terms of certification with other countries (which if other countries were smart, they'd cease recognizing until the U.S. gets their shit straight), it's really an egregious abdication of responsibility on the FAA's part.
(Caution, my thoughts are a bit rambly and scattered. It's been a while since I studied this in detail for a class where I had deep divided into the max 8 crash and FAA's lapse, so my memory is a bit foggy.)
The short answer is that unfortunately it's practically almost impossible to do this any other way, short of massively increasing funding for the FAA (which is presumably politically not going to be done.)
The long answer is, anyone with expertise ends up going to work at an aerospace company where they are properly compensated. You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc. (This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries where you need a high level of technical expertise.) And if you think it should be easily doable... here's a thought experiment. Say 20 people in boeing know about MCAS (pre crashes and their publicity). If even only 2 FAA employees need to be technically sound in their knowledge of such a niche system, that's about 10% of how many boeing employees know about it.
Now if you extrapolate that to all systems and all employees across multiple companies... you see why it's an issue for one agencies to have such deep knowledge about everything. (And this isn't even considering what happens when people quit etc.)
Because of this, the most obvious answer to "how does the FAA, without much engineers, decide what's safe or not", is to ask the experts and just have them certify stuff, well, not under oath, but as close to that as possible.
>You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc.
Incorrect. The engineers acting as FAA delegates are paid by Boeing, not the FAA. Toxic incentive. Stop shining that apple Leroy, plane needs to get shipped, and bossman is getting testy.
As far as your arguments on the information propagation front go, MCAS was deliberately designed against industry best practices and perception managed from regulators to do everything possible to avoid simulator training. Stop assuming good faith. This was malice. Malice that could only be executed upon because Boeing deliberately appointed junior engineers who didn't know the right questions to ask to FAA delegate positions.
I will not buy that delegating to the company is fine. The only people who benefit from that are the companies. I don't give a damn about the convenience to someone incentivized to go and industrially produce the least safe air transport product they can get away with. I care about the public's safety given I already know the market selects for incentive setters that flirt with risk in dangerous ways. And yes, that means we, the public, should damn well pay for that regulatory edifice. Especially if the rest of the world will treat FAA certification with reciprocity.
I'm afraid you're mostly preaching to the choir. My comment was to show how the real world issues develop ("How can the FAA trust Boeing to self audit after all that?!?" - because there's no other true option without major org changes) and how it's more complex than what meets the eye, not trying to justify status quo. I'm a very much pro safety guy who wants to do much more for aviation safety than just spread awareness on HN.
Btw for context, back in the 90s, a senior FAA official (I think a Director) had said something along the lines of “The FAA does not and cannot check everything, we just see that companies are doing their tests.”
> >You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc.
> Incorrect. The engineers acting as FAA delegates are paid by Boeing, not the FAA. Toxic incentive. Stop shining that apple Leroy, plane needs to get shipped, and bossman is getting testy.
I wasn't talking about who gets paid by whom. I meant whether the FAA is putting out openings for regulatory/engineering people, and what kind of people Boeing is hiring.
> MCAS was deliberately designed against industry best practices and perception managed from regulators to do everything possible to avoid simulator training. Stop assuming good faith.
I never said Boeing was in good faith. My report (based off the excellent NTSB/DOT report significantly, if anyone wants to delve in depth) was pretty much about that.
> I will not buy that delegating to the company is fine. The only people who benefit from that are the companies. I don't give a damn about the convenience to someone incentivized to go and industrially produce the least safe air transport product they can get away with. I care about the public's safety given I already know the market selects for incentive setters that flirt with risk in dangerous ways. And yes, that means we, the public, should damn well pay for that regulatory edifice. Especially if the rest of the world will treat FAA certification with reciprocity.
I fully agree. Got a better solution/alternative in mind that's feasible?
(Disclaimer, I'm not from the US if that is of any importance.)
You are talking about type certification which is a different certification/process way prior to this. This is talking about 'certificate of airworthiness' for a specific tail number. This is confirmation that the aircraft/tail number was built to type design. It has nothing to do with defining/certifying type design.
The FAA cert of airworthiness just confirms that this tail number was build exactly to type design, or, if required, anything that didn't went through non-conformance (say someone accidentally drilled a hole in the wrong spot and engineers had to decide if that compromised type design, mitigate it if needed, document it, and include documentation on all that with the tail number). There is no malice here this position/certification doesn't do what you seem to think it does.
You salary concern is wrong too. Aviation is a small world. The QA person has to be approved by the FAA to have a job. Boeing can threaten a paycheck, the FAA a career. Boeing is also Union in Seattle.
But again you should not be asking questions at this level just confirming the tail number was manufactured exactly to type design. You should be doing type design checks, that were approved as part of the type design process, and signed off and approved by the FAA. If the system requires someone to be an aerospace engineer level asking smart question during this phase, the entire FAA system failed and it wouldn't matter if FAA was on site or not. This is 1-2 filing cabinets worth of documentation that checks were performed and everything conformed to type. Documenting/verifying every part's serialized number in case of grounding/recall. That assemblies were assembled in the type design specified order, not the faster way Bob on the floor came up with (I think this was the problem with the doors, contractors not doing to type design and type design not requiring auditing in a way that caught that). Stuff like that.
Airbus has them too. So does Cessna, Bombardier, Dassault, and so on.
The cynical part in me wants to say: "Because it worked so well the last time!"
Did Boeing implement internal and process changes to justify this? That's an actual question, if they did this step would make sense.
I want to trust Boeing to do the right thing when it comes to safety. As is, I still prefer Airbus when I get a choice.
I'm still of the belief that whistleblower John Barnett was murdered by Boeing.
I have heard absolutely nothing about Boeing that suggests that anything meaningful has changed at all there.
> As is, I still prefer Airbus when I get a choice
Better pack a toxic fume respirator in your carry-on:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/delta-engines-airbus-toxic-fume...
Iffy by the headline, but the every-other-week model doesn't sound absolutely the worst. I don't have a great read on if it's a bad idea or not though.
So, Kelly Ortberg currently leading Boeing. Had family members who worked with him directly. He’s a very solid guy, good choice on Boeing’s part. Don’t know if they’re cutting corners to protect jobs and suckle the Trump admin, but that doesn’t seem characteristic of Kelly. My completely anecdotal take.
"“If something requires us to cease production, we will do that:” FAA -- "The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is considering whether to suspend the Production Certificate of Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) if it’s not satisfied changes to its safety culture are sufficient, LNA has learned."": https://old.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1bj6jsh/if_somethi... (From March 2024, old.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1bj6jsh/if_something_requires_us_to_cease_production_we/)
Do people trust the FAA on this matter though?
I don’t. It seems Europe didn’t either, because it grounded the Boeing planes before FAA did, and FAA followed just to keep face.
I guess the FAA can do all they want, let’s see how the UE validates it now.
We are doomed. Today's Boeing simply cannot be trusted.
Make the smart choice, fly Airbus.
Do the Europeans still allow their aerospace companies to bribe/kickback to win contracts? I know that was allowed a decade ago.
I know multiple nations fleets (not at the airbus/boeing level) were chosen based on kickbacks. I know we were the originally winning bid, but that it was not extended to us because we wouldn't do kickbacks (they are illegal for US companies but at the time not for Europeans). Personally I'd rather the fly on the best aircraft not the one that inflated the price a half million per plane and sent those extra millions back to the government officials the picked the airframe.
Headline and article misleading
Enshittification's final and hitherto unproclaimed stage:
1. Build product people like
2. Build competitive moat
3. Extract maximum value by raising prices or spending less.
4. When the value proposition becomes negative for the end user, then legislate your business' continued profits and existence.
Return on the trump bribe (ahem, investment)
What could possibly go wrong?
The headline might as well be FAA decides not to do literally their job. Again.
A more charitable explanation is that their resources are more limited than the mess Boeing have created and they can't be everywhere at once. The idea that boeing have earned back trust is laughable to me.
Ot but mentour pilot on youtube does an excellent job of explaining how insanely safety focused the airline industry is and has plenty of boeing analysis as well.
Bruh
LOL. What this tells me is I should never fly on a Boeing aircraft ever again. I wonder how much Boeing had to pay Trump to get the FAA to say this.
Probably agreed to some freebies on the refurbishment of the jet from Qatar.
the problem is Boeing know how to make safe planes, they just choose not to
many Engineer concern is ignore by management because it cost them something, greed to max
[flagged]
Next plane crash he'll fix with a sharpie.
Commemorative coin sales
This is a legitimate question we should be asking every single one of his hardcore supporters. Because they clearly consider him to be the only trusted authority; anyone who challenges him is clearly lying and out to get him.
I don't think this is representative of what's going on inside their heads. For sure it's the conclusion anyone applying critical thinking would come to, but that's not what's actually happening. What I hear when I ask is things like "oh I don't really like him myself, but he sure told them what's what" or "I think he's an idiot, but 100% better than those liberal criminals". In summary, the fact that Trump is a buffoon is fully accepted by most supporters, but for various reasons they prefer that to the alternative (that they perceive is available).
on the bright side, the next phone which gets sucked out of a mis-installed door will get even bigger publicity if it survives intact like the last one
"United will replace planes at Guam hub, upgrade lobby; same-day connections from Saipan to Hawaii starts Dec. 1": https://www.guampdn.com/news/united-will-replace-planes-at-g... (www.guampdn.com/news/united-will-replace-planes-at-guam-hub-upgrade-lobby-same-day-connections-from-saipan-to/article_ab170120-872b-4c31-81de-83ea44357bce.html); https://archive.is/S47A0
Wow they didn’t even change the name? Impressive.