Whitaker To Explain FAA Role In Door Plug Mishap

The problem with regulators and regulations as a solution is that people are a) fallible, b) selfish and c) lazy (not all regulators, of course).

I’ll take a healthy dose of Larry’s self discipline before I’d add another regulation or regulator.

No need for a new agency. The FAA would be just fine, if they received the funding and support from Congress necessary to carry out proper oversight, and had the enforcement powers that could truly hold management accountable for negligence or malfeasance. My understanding is that these conditions are missing - somebody correct me if I’m wrong. With a nod to Raf’s point, the system as designed can work, provided Boeing is held properly accountable for its inspection activities.

Good luck with your Boeing boycott, Robert. From my travels this summer, it didn’t look like it was catching on with the flying public generally, but who knows?

Then the market has spoken.

Why add additional regulation, additional funding, additional regulators when the flying public is perfectly happy with the status quo?

Well, Robert, when the market consists of a duopoly and the only alternative to consuming a company’s essential product is to not consume that essential product, regulators should step in to ensure that companies don’t abuse their market power. The market’s response is not the only reaction of consequence to corporate malfeasance. The chances of you being injured or killed by a Boeing aircraft are vanishingly small, so your individual boycott of their aircraft (if you truly are conducting one) really only hurts you, not Boeing. At the same time, the chances of someone being hurt or killed by Boeing’s negligence are non-zero, so the public interest at large is served by ensuring that Boeing is not allowed to put out a dangerous product.

As you have convinced me, my boycott is little served.

The public’s interest at large, is clearly non-existent.

The issues at Boeing are well advertised, well publicized, and well known. The flying public is clearly willing to accept the risk with no new regulations, no new agencies and no new changes.

I admit, I would have thought different, but I have been proven wrong.

Fly Boeing!

…but as you pointed out, the non-zero value is “vanishingly small.” So why such intense and prolonged furore over a vanishingly small probability, one that already is well within what is acceptable per engineering standards? Because the news media has whipped up the general public—and professionals in the aviation industry who ought to know better—into an irrational frenzy that has resulted in an absurd ad hoc set of standards when it comes to aerospace transportation—nothing short of perfection is acceptable. THAT is why NASA adopted a new and arbitrary standard for assessing Starliner, they couldn’t dare risk bringing the astronauts home because the slightest glitch would have triggered all kinds of accusations of irresponsibility and willful neglect and putting profit before human lives and corruption and… a CONGRESSIONAL HEARING. Oh Lord. Face it: if those astronauts had come home and two months later one of them died in a car crash on the New Jersey turnpike, we wouldn’t blink an eye; just another one of the not so vanishingly small number of 40,000 people who die EVERY YEAR in the U.S. in a motor vehicle transport. Is it because a human life when traveling in a car is so much less glamorous and worth nothing or because we are too stupid to see how we are being manipulated by the news media?

A scrutiny of what appeared to be a litany of revelations against Boeing since the first MAX crash in 2018 shows that the “well advertised, well publicized, and well known” “issues” were fabrications, misunderstandings and exaggerations by the news media, Congress, the general public and even professionals in aviation. The motives of the vast number of individuals acting independently vary, but their behavior had one common characteristic—each pretended competence in areas where they had little to none; each unwittingly used mere common sense in lieu of the advanced education needed to comprehend complex subjects in aviation or business and then aired the plausible-but-false understandings and conclusions that were bound to ensue. In the absence of contradiction, the layperson—armed with only common sense—found the plausible nonsense to be believable truth. Thus the collusion-like synergy of so many people behaving badly resulted in the tsunami of global negative perception of Boeing.

The notion that Boeing “hid” the need for simulator training for MCAS—the sole issue at the heart of the DOJ’s indictment of Boeing—was started by pilots, yes, four-striped Captains at a major airline, who claimed that as pilots they need to know about everything that goes on with the airplane, thus Boeing had deprived them of critical info they needed to fly the airplane.

That was at best a humorous notion, at worst it was fodder for a media looking for a sensational click-bait headline. They didn’t stop to consider that MCAS had—and still has—absolutely no human interface by which a pilot could control it, monitor it or even be aware that it existed (and didn’t need to)… no messages, procedures, gauges, levers, buttons, knobs, not even an ON/OFF switch. When it operated there was no flight deck effect… no G forces, the controls felt as expected, the only tell-tale sign—the trim wheel spinning for 3 or 4 seconds—was not differentiable from the Speed Trim System operation. (If it operated when not necessary, due to an erroneous AOA value, the flight deck effects were very clear: a sudden and increasing pitch down and the trim wheel spinning for a very long time, recognizable by pilots as a runaway stab trim condition, IF they had been trained on that scenario—as required for the basic 737 type rating).

Thus MCAS was “transparent to the pilots,” as Boeing clearly stated in the memo seeking FAA concurrence to remove all mention of it from the flight crew operations manual (FCOM). Human factors engineering required the suppression of MCAS from the operations manual… nothing to operate or monitor, no training possible, don’t mention it.

Yet the DOJ quoted from that memo in their indictment:

"On or about January 17, 2017, an employee of THE BOEING COMPANY emailed an employee of the FAA AEG about the 737 MAX FSB Report, stating in part, “Flight Controls: Delete MCAS, recall we decided we weren’t going to cover it [. . .] since it’s way outside the normal operating envelope.”

Yup, the ellipsis […] is the glossed over part of the memo that says “because it is transparent to the pilots.” Including those words would have raised eyebrows. That is just the tip of the iceberg. The case against Boeing has not just been a charade, it is massive fraud on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars, and counting. It’s not that the public interest is non-existent, it’s that the public interest is whatever sensational click-bait shows up on their smartphone, valid or not doesn’t matter. We’ve stopped using that executive function of trying to discern truth from fiction and reserving our fury for things that are genuinely a threat. Because making a racket and letting everyone know we have a voice and freedom of speech—never mind the content of our speech—has never been easier and felt so good. So good that it has become addictive for many.

You misunderstand, Pete P. As an individual, I have little chance of being killed by a fatal manufacturing or engineering error in an airplane. For the flying public as a whole, however, there is a high likelihood that someone will be killed by that error - and given the nature of commercial air travel, many people at the same time (e.g., Indonesia and Ethiopia).

If you’re willing to stand up and say that a certain level of fatal errors in transport aircraft design and construction are acceptable, then that’s your right - and I hope that my life never has to depend on your efforts. For myself, I think the right number is zero, especially when those errors can be avoided by management not putting their hands over their eyes and ears and wishing the problems away.

We don’t know yet who failed on making sure the door plug bolts were installed, but we need to know so that it doesn’t happen again. Congress, having oversight of the FAA, is doing exactly what it should do to investigate the failure and see what can be done to prevent future occurrences.

Both FAA and Boeing are bureaucracies with attendant failures.

Some great people, some of them retire early every time the US Congress plays games with funding.

Boeing is commendably trying to simplify processes and better integrate safety systems (my words), plus instill sound values in employees. The IAM strike will greatly impeded progress, I predict.

Remember the MCAS fiasco occurred because Boeing did not follow its safety review process as the design morphed from a nudge to aggressive - and no one in authority seriously questioned the change. (Engineering leaders should have.)

Congress may be investigating the FAA over the 737 MAX and door plug issues because, you know, both Boeing and the FAA managed to lose public trust after two deadly 737 MAX crashes. Some folks think the FAA should’ve been better at overseeing Boeing’s safety practices—though let’s be real, the FAA isn’t your momma. Investigating this door plug problem now is a great way to show that, yes, safety standards are totally being enforced this time around, and past mistakes are ancient history. And, facetiously speaking, it does make you wonder: does this sudden surge of accountability have anything to do with an upcoming election? Coincidence? Probably not.

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