> 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.
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.
To a company like Boeing? I think their tendrils are deep enough into government that it doesn't matter who the administration of the day is.
The number of people who work in government and the military and aren't subject to elections is orders of magnitude greater than the number of elected politicians.
Boeing is at the end stage of the feedback 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 aircraft 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. But the longer you wait, the harder it gets to fix it.
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.
> 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.
> 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 consequences part that I mentioned is where it's at, if one wanted to design a functioning system.
If there's an incident and the investigation reveals an engineer signed off on something that was contrary to process, they lose their license and get to switch careers to something else.
If it turns out management pushed the engineer to do that, personal liability on management means they get to do some long jail time.
With those two enforcement points, you cut out nearly all the cheating.
Personal liability on management never happens. If it did, they would find a way to transfer it somewhere else: a contractor from 3rd world country, a discardable subsidiary, etc. Nothing will stand in the way of profits, not even bad publicity - they would just sell / be bought, rebrand, and do it all over again.
falsified paperwork is better than no paper trail in the event planes start falling out of the sky - spotting one moderate falsification could very well lead to further verification when it comes to investigations deemed important by the public.
Ah, yes, no paperwork, I completely forgot about that. It's even more common than fake doing stuff.
Don't be so confident that falsification can be spotted. It usually can't. Or require very time-consuming cross-checks that I never saw happen in my entire 20y career, such as comparing the number times an internal control was run vs. the quantity of consumables used in the process that were bought.
In case of Boeing, the other problem is... who's going to look before the plane crashes?
>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!
^ this.
My father is an aerospace engineer. He has worked for many companies and in various positions, director/head of engineering/certification across various sectors. He now works for the regulator as an auditor and specialises in the sectors he has worked in and often with companies he's worked for. There is a huge amount of integrity involved for the profession and I've never heard of any cases where this has been questioned. At the end of the day, there are rules and processes to follow, don't follow them and it's quite simple you loose the power to verify your own work, no business wants this and it's much easier to work with the regulator and conform to the rules. Also if the regulator determines there is an issue or fault then they can ground the affected aircraft, in a number of cases the airlines/manufacturer even have clauses with these companies that are the along the lines of "if your product grounds us, you will pay us x amount per day" The regulator will also specify how much cost to rectify work will be so the company will lose money, that's why it's easier to just follow the rules!
I should add that the regulator will be to the letter. I was told a case where the company followed the test form a spec from standard x, but standard x was superseded twice. The latest spec and standard x, the testing was exactly the same but because the company had done the testing against x and not the latest they had to redo all the work. Regulator would not shift or give dispensation on passing it.
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.
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.
The FAA has a budget of USD ~23,000m. Surely you can fit in some experts there.
EASA fills a similar role on a budget a 100 times smaller (in USD it's ~300m), paying for ~800 personnel.
The main difference is that EASA doesn't handle ATC, but it shows that the aspect of the FTC's duties we are talking about here really can't be that expensive.
If you'd 10x the budget of the FAA, it would have the same budget as the entire EU or 4x Airbus/Boeing's revenue. That's ridiculous.
> If you'd 10x the budget of the FAA, it would have the same budget as the entire EU or 4x Airbus/Boeing's revenue. That's ridiculous.
10x is a bit ridiculous but I'm not sure it's that ridiculous for the FAA to have more expenditures than Boeing.
Sure, FAA (requested) budget is 22 Billion [1] while Boeing's revenue is 66 Billion [2]. However, United Airlines revenue is 57 Billion [3]. The FAA doesn't just manage Boeing so if we start adding up _every_ airline, airport, etc revenue I think that a budget of 66 Billion won't look as silly anymore. I mean they can't properly staff ATC currently so very trivially their current expenditures is too low.
This thread was not discussing the FAA's ATC duties.
I was trying to take the ATC component of the FAA out of the equation and illustrate why that is necessary. We should be looking specifically at the arm that certifies aircraft and try to figure out which order of magnitude we're dealing with. Luckily their European counterpart exists, which does not do ATC and thus allows us to get a better idea.
In fact if you look at the FAA's budget request breakdown you can see that the requested budget for their entire AVS services arm is less than 2B[1] (still much more expensive than EASA, but not too terrible).
While your comment is interesting, it's only tangential to what is being discussed.
> 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.
That's what an (effective) audit is, conducted by technically-competent auditors. These do exist, and while some of their checklists include some bullshit, not all of it is bullshit when there are qualitative reviews of exceptions and of the soundness of processes.
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.
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.
After their abysmal track record, how about making Boeing pay for outside (unaffiliated) engineers to certify the safety? Like the engineering equivalent of an audit?
I'm struggling to reconcile how you can give a company & self-certification system that failed so egregiously another chance.
The problem that needs to be addressed is the proper expansion and funding of the FAA, not sacrificing safety for the expediency of corporate concerns. This is a solvable problem but instead regulatory capture actively thwarts it. The future will see more MCAS scenarios and more crashes because the process favors and shows deference to $$$ rather than to regulators.
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.
You seem to want a system where the regulators, while embedded at Boeing, are just wandering around and looking at things. What we have in aviation is a system where engineers, the people wearing the rings, with an ethical and moral obligation to prevent harm to other people, are charged with identifying issues and escalating them as far as the FAA if needed as they work on their day-to-day tasks.
The latter is a much better system to find issues than the former, you get a chance to see a lot more issues when your actively working on the systems where the issues would be than if your walking around and looking at paperwork.
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.
Is there any reason to think this doesn’t apply to all aircraft using bleed air from the engines to pressurise the cabin? If not, only the 787 would be exempt, as far as I understand.
"“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/)
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.
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.
Looks like you are just a racist trying to pin things on black people.
Mr. Racist, here's a little fact check from chatGPT. You are still blaming people for their skin color - have some shame.
1. No "2013 airframe scandal" like that exists.
Boeing has had multiple controversies (e.g. outsourcing of 787 Dreamliner parts, later the 737 MAX crisis), but none that match this story.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, Boeing did face production quality problems with the 787 Dreamliner because large parts of the aircraft were outsourced globally, and some suppliers had issues meeting specifications. But this was not tied to race or prison labor in the way described.
2. No evidence of a race-based relocation of factories.
Boeing has moved or opened facilities (e.g. in South Carolina) for business, tax, and labor reasons. There is no credible reporting that this was to "give jobs to Black people" or to people leaving prison.
The claim sounds like a distortion of real events: Boeing did use suppliers in different regions, including some that hired less-skilled labor, but this was a cost and logistics decision.
3. About the “manual etching defects.”
Real reports do exist about manufacturing defects: gaps, shimming issues, and mis-drilled holes have been found in some Boeing fuselages, particularly in the 787. These were documented by whistleblowers and investigations.
But they were not due to "manual etching by ex-prisoners"; they came from industrial quality-control failures and supplier/manufacturer mismanagement.
4. Decision to “keep defective parts.”
There have indeed been allegations that Boeing sometimes tolerated defects to keep production on schedule. This is a legitimate criticism, but again, it has nothing to do with the story in the text you shared about racial hiring or prisons.
It's not really worth replying to racists, but I can't trust a ChatGPT rebuttal to be anything resembling factually correct. In future, I'd advise pointing out the bigotry, rebutting the things you know to be false, and then ending the comment there.
I think this is the wrong method to deal with racist people. You’re talking to someone while criticizing the other and hoping the message will be read, this can be construed as passive-aggressive.
More importantly, by aiming for a strict exclusion, you make it into a us-or-them stake. Without discussion, they’ll just have to get rid of you, or you of them, but no entendre is possible. In this day and age, I think we should rather listen to each other and try to work on a centrist solution rather than leading to the current situation, which we’re all paying.
By being closed-minded, you miss informing yourself about racism prevention. By doing this, you do not try to resolve the problems, but create your own opponent.
Fourth, it may very well happen that GP became racist after a rape, for example. By segregating victims, you help criminals reproduce the crimes. As a matter of fact, if you chose racism, like the one made by your political leaders when they used race in their criteria to filter the location of the jobs, to derive the strategy of Boeing, and it mades planes crashes, and you cover it up with your accusations, it makes more planes crash.
FWIW - I work in aerospace. I believe this is talking about their FAA Designated Engineering Representatives (DERs). They are employed directly by the company or are consultants - they are subject matter experts in their domain. They act as the FAA delegate within the company. They generally have authority that goes well beyond the typical employee or QA person.
The ones I have worked with have no problem telling management to go pound sand when they are pushing schedule.
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.
It is a little funny to make this comment under an article about a contraversial decision made by a government agency. Believe it or not, government agencies tend to have some overlap with politics.
People are really reaching. Bad governance didn't spring into existence the moment Trump stepped into the oval office. It's really very silly and doesn't lend itself to productive discourse. You end up oversimplifying problems for one thing or expanding them to such an immense size by linking it to every other political issue it basically negates the usefulness of any direct discussion on the topic. We may as well just make daily threads about things and people we hate, with people contributing new insights as to how terrible they are in a self supporting loop while any useful comments and threads fall through the cracks.
Who is in charge of the government departments changes how the government functions massively. There is a tremendous difference in support and effort depending on who has been appointed to run an agency. Just as one example, there is a difference between a nuclear physicist as the secretary of energy and a governor who has a lot of oil in his state. Certainly there are issues with the American government but this is yet again silly both sidesing something where clearly there is “not great” vs “purposeful appointments to actively ruin institutions “.
This is purely a result of politics 'busting into the room' where previously it only had the door wedged open a bit so it could hear what was going on.
And politics is sticky and smelly, so once the stain of politics has touched a topic, it's a long term taint. Better get used to it, because politics isn't very discerning and has been getting pretty handsy of late.
Only in the sense that there are federal regulations that apply to all industries. But, for an extreme example, there is absolutely no federal regulation of marijuana dispensaries. Whose existence is entirely enabled by state laws, and federal reluctance to enforce federal law in a case where both state law and public opinion are against it.
Not just reluctance, there has been an annual spending rider since 2015 that says no money can be spent prosecuting people for marijuana crimes federally if they are in compliance with their state’s marijuana laws.
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.
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.
Elections matter
To a company like Boeing? I think their tendrils are deep enough into government that it doesn't matter who the administration of the day is.
The number of people who work in government and the military and aren't subject to elections is orders of magnitude greater than the number of elected politicians.
Boeing is at the end stage of the feedback 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 aircraft 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. But the longer you wait, the harder it gets to fix it.
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.
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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.
> 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.
> 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.
> It's sooo extremely easy to fake everything!
The consequences part that I mentioned is where it's at, if one wanted to design a functioning system.
If there's an incident and the investigation reveals an engineer signed off on something that was contrary to process, they lose their license and get to switch careers to something else.
If it turns out management pushed the engineer to do that, personal liability on management means they get to do some long jail time.
With those two enforcement points, you cut out nearly all the cheating.
Personal liability on management never happens. If it did, they would find a way to transfer it somewhere else: a contractor from 3rd world country, a discardable subsidiary, etc. Nothing will stand in the way of profits, not even bad publicity - they would just sell / be bought, rebrand, and do it all over again.
falsified paperwork is better than no paper trail in the event planes start falling out of the sky - spotting one moderate falsification could very well lead to further verification when it comes to investigations deemed important by the public.
Ah, yes, no paperwork, I completely forgot about that. It's even more common than fake doing stuff.
Don't be so confident that falsification can be spotted. It usually can't. Or require very time-consuming cross-checks that I never saw happen in my entire 20y career, such as comparing the number times an internal control was run vs. the quantity of consumables used in the process that were bought.
In case of Boeing, the other problem is... who's going to look before the plane crashes?
But when the plane finally crashes, wouldn't it be obvious in the investigation? Wouldn't that lead to further inspections of other planes?
But the procedure/QC already failed - those people are dead...
>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!
^ this. My father is an aerospace engineer. He has worked for many companies and in various positions, director/head of engineering/certification across various sectors. He now works for the regulator as an auditor and specialises in the sectors he has worked in and often with companies he's worked for. There is a huge amount of integrity involved for the profession and I've never heard of any cases where this has been questioned. At the end of the day, there are rules and processes to follow, don't follow them and it's quite simple you loose the power to verify your own work, no business wants this and it's much easier to work with the regulator and conform to the rules. Also if the regulator determines there is an issue or fault then they can ground the affected aircraft, in a number of cases the airlines/manufacturer even have clauses with these companies that are the along the lines of "if your product grounds us, you will pay us x amount per day" The regulator will also specify how much cost to rectify work will be so the company will lose money, that's why it's easier to just follow the rules!
I should add that the regulator will be to the letter. I was told a case where the company followed the test form a spec from standard x, but standard x was superseded twice. The latest spec and standard x, the testing was exactly the same but because the company had done the testing against x and not the latest they had to redo all the work. Regulator would not shift or give dispensation on passing it.
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.
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.
They get done the same? Embraer works with lots of Americans.
The FAA has a budget of USD ~23,000m. Surely you can fit in some experts there.
EASA fills a similar role on a budget a 100 times smaller (in USD it's ~300m), paying for ~800 personnel.
The main difference is that EASA doesn't handle ATC, but it shows that the aspect of the FTC's duties we are talking about here really can't be that expensive.
If you'd 10x the budget of the FAA, it would have the same budget as the entire EU or 4x Airbus/Boeing's revenue. That's ridiculous.
> If you'd 10x the budget of the FAA, it would have the same budget as the entire EU or 4x Airbus/Boeing's revenue. That's ridiculous.
10x is a bit ridiculous but I'm not sure it's that ridiculous for the FAA to have more expenditures than Boeing.
Sure, FAA (requested) budget is 22 Billion [1] while Boeing's revenue is 66 Billion [2]. However, United Airlines revenue is 57 Billion [3]. The FAA doesn't just manage Boeing so if we start adding up _every_ airline, airport, etc revenue I think that a budget of 66 Billion won't look as silly anymore. I mean they can't properly staff ATC currently so very trivially their current expenditures is too low.
[1]: https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/F...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines
This thread was not discussing the FAA's ATC duties.
I was trying to take the ATC component of the FAA out of the equation and illustrate why that is necessary. We should be looking specifically at the arm that certifies aircraft and try to figure out which order of magnitude we're dealing with. Luckily their European counterpart exists, which does not do ATC and thus allows us to get a better idea.
In fact if you look at the FAA's budget request breakdown you can see that the requested budget for their entire AVS services arm is less than 2B[1] (still much more expensive than EASA, but not too terrible).
While your comment is interesting, it's only tangential to what is being discussed.
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-05/F...
> 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.
That's what an (effective) audit is, conducted by technically-competent auditors. These do exist, and while some of their checklists include some bullshit, not all of it is bullshit when there are qualitative reviews of exceptions and of the soundness of processes.
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.
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.
After their abysmal track record, how about making Boeing pay for outside (unaffiliated) engineers to certify the safety? Like the engineering equivalent of an audit?
I'm struggling to reconcile how you can give a company & self-certification system that failed so egregiously another chance.
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.
So Boeing can do something the US government can't do? I don't buy that argument.
The problem that needs to be addressed is the proper expansion and funding of the FAA, not sacrificing safety for the expediency of corporate concerns. This is a solvable problem but instead regulatory capture actively thwarts it. The future will see more MCAS scenarios and more crashes because the process favors and shows deference to $$$ rather than to regulators.
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.
You seem to want a system where the regulators, while embedded at Boeing, are just wandering around and looking at things. What we have in aviation is a system where engineers, the people wearing the rings, with an ethical and moral obligation to prevent harm to other people, are charged with identifying issues and escalating them as far as the FAA if needed as they work on their day-to-day tasks.
The latter is a much better system to find issues than the former, you get a chance to see a lot more issues when your actively working on the systems where the issues would be than if your walking around and looking at paperwork.
Would the same system work for other industries, e.g. banks or medical research?
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...
Is there any reason to think this doesn’t apply to all aircraft using bleed air from the engines to pressurise the cabin? If not, only the 787 would be exempt, as far as I understand.
"“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/)
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.
I hear the FAA changed their slogan to "What could possibly go wrong?".
Even if this was a sound practical decision surely they can see how it's radioactive for their(FAA) reputation?
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.
5. Fail spectacularly.
6. Get acquired by private equity through an LBO.
7. Become even worse.
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.
> Personally I'd rather the fly on the best aircraft
Is that the one crashing down from the sky every few months?
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.
The next thing they could do is invalidate FAA certifications and require separate certifications from EASA.
Or maybe Trump can help by withdrawing from ICAO? /s
Welp, we can pay costs in blood or money. Looks like the idea is to pay in blood.
That said, money didn't go great for Boeing either after the last batch of people died.
I have a hard time not imagining that the engineering culture at Boeing is not just as moribund as it was.
Return on the trump bribe (ahem, investment)
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Looks like you are just a racist trying to pin things on black people.
Mr. Racist, here's a little fact check from chatGPT. You are still blaming people for their skin color - have some shame.
1. No "2013 airframe scandal" like that exists.
Boeing has had multiple controversies (e.g. outsourcing of 787 Dreamliner parts, later the 737 MAX crisis), but none that match this story.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, Boeing did face production quality problems with the 787 Dreamliner because large parts of the aircraft were outsourced globally, and some suppliers had issues meeting specifications. But this was not tied to race or prison labor in the way described.
2. No evidence of a race-based relocation of factories.
Boeing has moved or opened facilities (e.g. in South Carolina) for business, tax, and labor reasons. There is no credible reporting that this was to "give jobs to Black people" or to people leaving prison.
The claim sounds like a distortion of real events: Boeing did use suppliers in different regions, including some that hired less-skilled labor, but this was a cost and logistics decision.
3. About the “manual etching defects.”
Real reports do exist about manufacturing defects: gaps, shimming issues, and mis-drilled holes have been found in some Boeing fuselages, particularly in the 787. These were documented by whistleblowers and investigations.
But they were not due to "manual etching by ex-prisoners"; they came from industrial quality-control failures and supplier/manufacturer mismanagement.
4. Decision to “keep defective parts.”
There have indeed been allegations that Boeing sometimes tolerated defects to keep production on schedule. This is a legitimate criticism, but again, it has nothing to do with the story in the text you shared about racial hiring or prisons.
It's not really worth replying to racists, but I can't trust a ChatGPT rebuttal to be anything resembling factually correct. In future, I'd advise pointing out the bigotry, rebutting the things you know to be false, and then ending the comment there.
I think this is the wrong method to deal with racist people. You’re talking to someone while criticizing the other and hoping the message will be read, this can be construed as passive-aggressive.
More importantly, by aiming for a strict exclusion, you make it into a us-or-them stake. Without discussion, they’ll just have to get rid of you, or you of them, but no entendre is possible. In this day and age, I think we should rather listen to each other and try to work on a centrist solution rather than leading to the current situation, which we’re all paying.
By being closed-minded, you miss informing yourself about racism prevention. By doing this, you do not try to resolve the problems, but create your own opponent.
Fourth, it may very well happen that GP became racist after a rape, for example. By segregating victims, you help criminals reproduce the crimes. As a matter of fact, if you chose racism, like the one made by your political leaders when they used race in their criteria to filter the location of the jobs, to derive the strategy of Boeing, and it mades planes crashes, and you cover it up with your accusations, it makes more planes crash.
They never learn do they? Eventually airlines will just go somewhere else for planes that shouldn't crash.
FWIW - I work in aerospace. I believe this is talking about their FAA Designated Engineering Representatives (DERs). They are employed directly by the company or are consultants - they are subject matter experts in their domain. They act as the FAA delegate within the company. They generally have authority that goes well beyond the typical employee or QA person.
The ones I have worked with have no problem telling management to go pound sand when they are pushing schedule.
Headline and article misleading
What could possibly go wrong?
is it even corruption if it is certified by law?
Because it worked so well last time, right?
No way I'm flying Boeing again.
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.
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
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.
Bruh
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It is a little funny to make this comment under an article about a contraversial decision made by a government agency. Believe it or not, government agencies tend to have some overlap with politics.
Trump himself is not involved in every decision of every government department.
The buck stops where, again?
He is responsible for his appointments however.
People are really reaching. Bad governance didn't spring into existence the moment Trump stepped into the oval office. It's really very silly and doesn't lend itself to productive discourse. You end up oversimplifying problems for one thing or expanding them to such an immense size by linking it to every other political issue it basically negates the usefulness of any direct discussion on the topic. We may as well just make daily threads about things and people we hate, with people contributing new insights as to how terrible they are in a self supporting loop while any useful comments and threads fall through the cracks.
Who is in charge of the government departments changes how the government functions massively. There is a tremendous difference in support and effort depending on who has been appointed to run an agency. Just as one example, there is a difference between a nuclear physicist as the secretary of energy and a governor who has a lot of oil in his state. Certainly there are issues with the American government but this is yet again silly both sidesing something where clearly there is “not great” vs “purposeful appointments to actively ruin institutions “.
When you have an openly, brazenly corrupt president who ignores the law, every government decision is suspicious.
This is purely a result of politics 'busting into the room' where previously it only had the door wedged open a bit so it could hear what was going on.
And politics is sticky and smelly, so once the stain of politics has touched a topic, it's a long term taint. Better get used to it, because politics isn't very discerning and has been getting pretty handsy of late.
It's a federally regulated industry; it's inherently political.
Every industry is federally regulated.
Only in the sense that there are federal regulations that apply to all industries. But, for an extreme example, there is absolutely no federal regulation of marijuana dispensaries. Whose existence is entirely enabled by state laws, and federal reluctance to enforce federal law in a case where both state law and public opinion are against it.
Not just reluctance, there has been an annual spending rider since 2015 that says no money can be spent prosecuting people for marijuana crimes federally if they are in compliance with their state’s marijuana laws.
The hostility to opinions of out groups is a problem. It requires work to fight that tendency.
You mean like these out-group opinions that the joint terrorism task force has just been tasked to investigate?
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-commo...
These groups and individuals are now being targeted by the federal government for exercising the most basic of their first amendment rights.
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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.