People seem to have an easier time forgiving crimes if they're highly abstracted. I'm not sure if this is apocryphal but apparently drone pilots are less likely than other soldiers to feel extreme guilt about killing people. Prince Harry flew a helicopter in action and compared it to a video game, likely a PR recruiting statement but revealing nonetheless. I'm not a soldier so am speaking out of turn and may be completely off base.
IIRC I read some similar research as well - not only about drones, but also in general that most casualties are made by "fire and kill" weapons like artilery and air power mostly due to how soldiers tend to avoid killing other people unless prepared psychologically.
Is it more important to dole out punishments or to get the best result? Because the best result isn't going to be from draconian punishments for CEOs.
The strongest irony of what I suspect you are suggesting is that the #1 lesson of high-performance safety cultures is a blameless attitude to accidents. Criminal liabilities for the CEO ... are better than criminal liabilities for lower level employees. But still not the path to the highest levels of safety.
How is expecting the person who is responsible for the outcome of the company to be responsible draconian?
If I kill someone, I am responsible. If I direct someone else to kill someone, we’re both responsible to different degrees. If I create an elaborate structure wherein the lower levels are inculcated that killing people is just part of the job, the responsibility starts dramatically shifting upwards.
It isn't a question of responsibility, he is the one responsible. He shouldn't be criminally liable. He didn't design the plane, build or operate it; his responsibility for an accident is something of a commercial fiction.
It makes total sense to hold him as the person responsible. It even (probably) makes sense for the board to sack him immediately. But it is arbitrary and excessive to criminally prosecute him. Lots of CEOs have done worse and gotten away with it; they're in positions of great power and being human they make a lot of mistakes. The bankers alone have ruined the wealth of generations, let alone the sitautions the military-industrial complex creates.
Picking on this person because of 2 plane crashes is not remotely consistent with how this sort of thing is handled elsewhere. It is unfair and it'll just add pressure to the death of manufacturing in the west. And to top it off it probably won't change the safety profile of Boeing planes going forward.
But the difference there is that the mechanic is selling things that aren't his. The CEO & friends are making decisions that are their within their remit to make, they just made poor decisions.
People have been making similar arguments since the development of the limited liability company. It turns out that limiting liability is a far better system than the alternative for getting good things done.
We've already got a problem where all the manufacturing is heading to Asia. Criminal penalties hanging over the heads of CEOs of manufacturing companies will not help the situation.
> It turns out that limiting liability is a far better system
It's hilarious how gung-ho free market cheerleaders are about systematic responsibility and accountability and skin-in-the-game decision making... right up until the millisecond that involves something other than rich people getting paid for being rich, and then it's bailouts this and limited liability that.
And criminal prosecutions of decision makers isn't as much skin in the game as it is making it risky to be responsible. It is just asking for lower-quality people to move in to high ranking posts and for confusing corporate structures to emerge.
It is better to impose large financial penalties on the company then let the markets sort out the details. I don't even mind the CEO suffering large penalties, but he and Boeing need to negotiate that before the event and put it in his contract, not after the fact.
Endangering the health of the public like for example dumping toxic waste or destroying a safety culture are criminal.
If Boeing decided to build a 797 story that was even bigger than the Airbus 380 and lost a lot of money, then limited liability would kick in. However, to deliberately cut safety culture and endanger the public is criminal.
1. You're talking about a model that incentivises shareholders (with limited liability) to appoint incompetent CEOs who then take the fall for over-cutting safety standards. That isn't the best approach to safety - in fact, it would slightly reward the people most responsible for this situation because some of the liability would fall on the CEO rather than on profits.
That is neither fair nor helpful. Hit the company with a huge fine then let the board decide if the CEO stays or goes - that is how it is traditionally done and it is an effective model for getting results.
2. Deliberately changing a culture isn't criminal; that is something CEOs are expected to do sometimes. It is equivalent to saying a developer should be liable if they do an unnecessary refactor and it makes the code worse for a customer.
3.
> and endanger the public is criminal.
You say this but we allow car manufacturers to operate. Cars manufacturers have done more damage to people I know than Boeing could hope to. The focus on Boeing is hysterical.
You are assuming the same people blaming C-suite execs at Boeing would not blame the same people who OK'ed high grilles on pickup trucks that caused an increase in pedestrian deaths. That might be a bad assumption. "But there's no specific law," and "but consumer choice" don't cut it.
Change the incentives, change the targets of incentives, change the results.
Cars are regulated for safety. High grills and raised trucks kill. Pedestrian deaths in the US go up because of these things while they are going down in the rest of the world. Are you really suggesting that we must have a law against high grills? Or does that fit a regulatory framework?
> Are you really suggesting that we must have a law against high grills?
No. I'm suggesting that if there is a criminal inquiry into safety defects of a product, it should target the company as an entity, not company officers.
And that we should maintain consistent standards; ie, display more tolerance of Boeing's performance than people are showing.
A blameless
culture
needs to take into account bad actors. You might add more processes for part sovereignty for example. This is what you rely on for safety.
In addition yeah also prosecute criminals. But that doesn’t stop crime. See “war on drugs” for example.
I assume you’re not being intentionally dishonest, but have instead been taken in by propaganda, so allow me to remind you that the primary purpose and effect of incarceration is preventing reoffending. Fortunately a tiny minority commits the vast majority of violent crimes[1], so considerable reduction can be achieved by containing those criminals’ ability to commit crimes.
Not sure which USA you're living in but what you're saying does not match reality. I've had a lot of friends and family in and out of jail and it's hell, at least in the US.
Hell is living in a place where you have a 1 in 70 chance of being a victim of a violent crime per year, and being gaslit by extremely co-dependent people into having more empathy for narcissist sociopaths than their traumatized innocent victims.
If people don't want to do serious jail time they shouldn't do serious crimes, the contract couldn't possibly be more simple. The purpose of incarceration isn't to coddle murderers, it's great if they change their life but ultimately it's to extract murderers from society so decent people can live peaceful and successful lives and anything else beyond that is ancillary.
And how is that strategy working out? Because lots and lots of countries have more humane justice systems and are safer. But I guess throwing more people in jail than the Soviet Union had in gulags can’t fail, only we can fail at throwing more people in jail.
It would be nice if society could develop some kind of technique to use in these cases of "we live in different realities". It sucks to have to write a guy off just because he lives in a different filter bubble than you do, yet I currently don't see any other option. And it seems like an issue that's growing in size.
Especially when the other guy “lives in a reality” where he thinks violently victimizing you is fine. It’s almost as if we need some way to separate from such people.
> The purpose of incarceration isn't to coddle murderers,
Unfortunatly in the real world your criminal justice ethics will have to accommodate crimes that are not murder, so you might need to think about some prisoners eventually getting released, who might then go on and do more criming.
> it's great if they change their life but ultimately it's to extract murderers from society
In that case, there is no need to make prisons particularly cruel. Cost can be debated, but surely as a society, we can put a value on humaneness. Even if not, if say I, a billionaire, wanted prisoners eat caviar every night and am willing to fund it, surely this should be allowed.
> Is it more important to dole out punishments or to get the best result? Because the best result isn't going to be from draconian punishments for CEOs.
Is that same logic applied to the lower class? Or is this basically admitting that if you are rich enough and bury your crimes and negligence behind enough paperwork and complexity, that you are no longer culpable?
I get your point that applying hard rules will encourage people to escape them, but there needs to be some framework opposed to the current anything goes and we might fine you at worst.
Yes, it is. Lower class voters (ie, the majority of voters) are typically responsible for some of the most horrific damage done to society through a combination of inattention and negligence through poor financial, healthcare, welfare, warfare and industrial policies.
We politely ignore that and focus on the present and the future, because they have too much power as a class to be punished and it wouldn't do much good anyway.
What counts as the "national security state"? Because as far as I recall the military is popular, the FBI was a trusted institution up to 2016 and getting a bit partisan since then. PATRIOT Act was passed in an environment of roaring support for the Bush administration over the screams of anyone who cared about basic rights and process. You don't have to go far to find people who support US intervention in Ukraine.
The US security state, in all its facets, has a lot of popular support. By people who I think are a bit foolish, but nevertheless. (although I'll sneak in that the karmic justice of watching the mechanisms of the War on Terror get turned on Republican voters has been sad but satisfying)
>>Because the best result isn't going to be from draconian punishments for CEOs.
Why do you bring "draconian" punishment? Is punishment always draconian? Are the best results observed in places where crimes are not punished? Could you provide references to research that confirms this?
Or your worries that punishments should not apply to CEOs?
I think having a blameless culture is a separate issue.
Let's say Bob gets a job in a Boeing factory and on every plane he works on, he deliberately hides a bunch of broken components in the system, thereby causing the planes to fall out of the sky. We can talk blamelessly about how we can avoid every hiring someone like Bob again, or taking precautions against malicious employees, but Bob himself has to accept the criminal liabilities that come with the choices he made: his decisions caused people to die.
But what happens when Bob instead installs himself as the CEO, and deliberately makes choices that prioritise revenue and stock prices over safety, knowing full well the risks that he is forcing on people, and that his planes in some cases fundamentally don't work? From a blameless culture perspective, we again need to figure out how we can avoid hitting another Bob and having these mistakes happen again, but surely we also have to recognise that our CEO actively, and in some sense maliciously, made decisions that caused people to die?
In this case, thankfully (and ultimately lucky) nobody has died - although previous incidents have not had such good outcomes. But we still need to recognise that this culture came from decisions made at the top of the organisation. I fully support a blameless culture that doesn't punish people for making mistakes and tries to fix the long-term, fundamental issues rather than find a scapegoat for each incident. But this goes beyond simply making mistakes, especially when one remembers the pattern of behaviour within the Boeing organisation that has caused several incidents like this.
I picked the CEO as an example because it's a visible role, although in this case I believe several CEOs have overseen the decision making that has lead to these incidents. I am not saying that the CEO specifically is at fault here. But wilful decisions have absolutely been made that have put us in this situation, and I think it is absolutely right that if you make decisions that ultimately lead to potential injury and death, you need to suffer the consequences of those decisions. And for that, we have a criminal justice system.
Someone has to make the final call on how much money to spend on making planes safe. The spend can't be $infinite and will be more than $1.
We can quibble with the amount that got picked. It turns out in this case the amount spent was too low. But it is unreasonable to talk about "... deliberately makes choices that prioritise revenue and stock prices over safety ...". At some point the call has to be made that the planes being built are safe enough, and that from there start to focus on profits. These companies have to produce more value than they consume (which is what "profits" represents at the macro level) otherwise there isn't any point producing.
In this case the call was made poorly, but the call had to be made. Holding the call maker personally responsible isn't the path to more successful outcomes in the future. The path that has been working quite well for around 2 centuries is to hold the company responsible for what the company did. If we start penalising CEOs for trying to build planes profitably, then it is possible that the industry will collapse. There is no justification here to hold people personally liable. It is enough to hit Boeing with an appropriate fine.
Maybe it should be okay to punish the decision makers when they decide to go against the recommendation of engineers for profit and it leads to hundreds of dead people. If not prison maybe they should be stripped of all their wealth rather than get a golden parachute as that's the worst outcome they have today.
When you consistently make decisions that knowingly prioritise profit over product safety[0], you have crossed the line between financial prudence and corporate manslaughter.
> But it is unreasonable to talk about "... deliberately makes choices that prioritise revenue and stock prices over safety ..."
I can't see how that is unreasonable. Nobody here is arguing that Boeing officials should be held criminally liable because they didn't invest enough money into safety. The liability is because they are blatantly disregarding safety. They invented MCAS and didn't let pilots know about it. One plane crashes and they don't care. Second plane crashes and they don't care. For years, stupid things keep happening and they still don't care.
By your logic, a psychopath CEO may deliberately undermine safety culture to earn more profits and still won't be held responsible, because it's “limited liability”. Limited liability means that financial liability is limited, not criminal one.
> By your logic, a psychopath CEO may deliberately undermine safety culture to earn more profits and still won't be held responsible, because it's “limited liability”.
Yep. This is how it is generally done. Shareholder's in Boeing are literally responsible for installing "a psycopath CEO" who undermined safety and they aren't liable. I see little difference between that and extending the protection to the CEO as well. It gets better results because we don't chase risk-averse people out of the CEO position. In this situation, we WANT the most risk-averse people we can find in the CEO seat of the airline manufacturers. They won't take it if the response to a crisis is making the position more risky.
There is an argument that the CEO should be liable if it leads to more productive results. But I don't see why that would be true - it is more effective to adjust the profitability of the company when things go wrong and let the incentives do the rest. The default position is that doing your job poorly is not criminal.
Also; most CEOs are psycopaths. You don't need to include it as an adjective. It is built in to the title.
I (personally) think the best result does involve criminal liabilities for CEOs. That's having seen this same story play out at many organizations.
However, criminal liability in itself won't solve it. Capitalism forces this kind of behavior; it's the natural trend for any company. The Dictator's Handbook describes it well.
What's needed is what's been done in every other industry: Regulation which changes incentive structures. Raw capitalism forces meat packing plants to pack ground rats in with your ground beef, quack medicines, and all sorts of other issues. The regulatory solution needs to have short-term economic consequences of some kind for doing the wrong thing. There are many of those, including:
1) Require insurance, and let the market sort it out. If the settlements and fees came from an insurance company rather than Boeing, the insurance company could set rules and inspections as it believed adequate to turn a profit.
2) Have high standards and regular inspections
3) Major changes to both capitalism and corporate governance. We have the best system we've thought of so far, but we sort of stopped thinking about new systems 50-100 years ago (fascism and communism were the last major attempts, and didn't turn out too well)
4) Completely overhaul our infrastructure for transparency. This could include whistleblower protections, as well as FOIA-like schemes, where an academic can look at what Boeing is doing.
It's worth noting this is a quasi-monopoly / duopoly situation, so market systems tend to work worse than most places.
But yes, it's a problem that criminal consequences are for poor people or people lower down the rungs. People at the top should go to prison too if they do something bad, with the same quality legal process as poor people.
All the issues are systemic, so it can't be the responsibility of some low-level employees. But it is kind of curious that Boeing suddenly wants to buy Spirit Aerosystems.
The curious things is that they divested Spirit Aerosystems in the first place, in a financial engineering move that seemed to serve no business purpose besides a PE pump and dump.
It kind ofnmade sense so: Tier one aerostructure suppliers are doing the easiest work, not like avionics and engine OEMs. By having those activities in-house, you have a cost center. Having that as a third-party turns it into a profit center. Also, a third party can theoretically work for other customers. Airbus did the same thing.
In practice so, there are only two aircraft OEMs. Hence those structure tier ones are kind of screwed. Automotive tier ones have much more choice regarding customers.
It only makes sense if your only metric is cost. There are a lot of reasons why Airbus owns the subsidiaries who do Spirit's type of work for Airbus (such as the airframe). Airbus does not do the same thing as Boeing.
Well, Airbus is a customer of Spirit Aerospace. And Premium Aerotec, well, they were very, very close to spin it out completely. Bavk the day, it was part of what today is Defence and Space. And Premium Aerotec is subsiediary of Airbus, it is not part of any of its divisions. So, somewhere between Spirit Aerospace and and being in-house.
Airbus didn't spin them out. It doesn't matter if they thought about it, because they decided it was a bad idea. It's nothing like Spirit and Boeing. Even as a subsidiary, the relationship is much more vertically integrated.
No idea. When it comes to bad quality controls and processes, the model doesn't matter much so. Also, I have no idea how Airbusbis surveilling and working with Spirit Aerospace compared to Boeing.
We might get the answers soon. If Boeing really wants to buy Spirit we might see Airbus’ exposure. That said, it wouldn’t be unheard them building for each other. Pretty sure Airbus manufactured parts for Boeing and vice versa in the past.
Boeing spun off Spirit Aerosystems to create the appearance of better RONA,, fragment their unionized workforce, and substitute contract demands for price and quality for engineering.
sometimes I wonder if org charts are engineered to make sure misdeeds are attributed to diffuse cultural/systemic problems that can’t be prosecuted:
- you can’t blame the low level employees inhabiting the system be their powerless to change it
- the CEOs are hoping that they’ve installed enough layers of middle management that they can claim plausible deniability about any on the ground problems (and ignore that their job is to be the manager-of-managers)
Right, but it is nebulous as to who to pin it on. You can't arrest every employee of Boeing. "The buck stops here" won't work, their lawyers are too good. So the answer isn't criminality, the answer is huge fines, in terms of 5% plus of annual revenue and oversight.
I would love for an impossible outcome from this that MBAs are deemed illegal. Can anyone honestly point to an example of where an MBA has had a positive long term effect by any of their decisions?
As I wrote elsewhere, under EASA rules high ranking people at an organization holding design and / or production organisation approvals, are personally responsible, and liable incl. criminal liability, to make sure their organisation works properly. I forget the exact term for this role so.
Not sure about FAA rules, but I assume they are somewhat similar. So at the very least, those individuals, at Boeing and Spirit Aerospace, should be a tad worried now. By the way, senior means VP-levek and above, usually one for the design side (propably less relevant in the door plug question), one on production side (they should be worried), one each for design and production quality (same as above, the production quality oeople should be worried a lot) as well as one for supply chain and other functiobs with less responsibilities (the supply chain people are imolicated in this door plug thing as).
Personally, I don't see how the FAA can just let this slip, their relationship with international partbers and their reputation is already damaged by the 737 MAX, so they have to do something about it.
>>> Not sure about FAA rules, but I assume they are somewhat similar. So at the very least, those individuals, at Boeing and Spirit Aerospace, should be a tad worried now.
It’s funny to see comments like. You think this isn’t just a dog and pony show? They don’t give a damn. They will sleep just fine. Nothing will happen because the government is in bed with these folks and they don’t implicate their own and the sooner you understand that the less it shocks you when nothing happens.
Comments like this just propagate a public opinion of indifference which really does make it harder for the government to hold people responsible. There obviously have been numerous cases of the govt stepping in effectively on such malfeasance and the smart thing to do is to demand that this becomes one of those cases. Not “I’m so smart I see through the bullshit so I expect (and therefore am encouraging) nothing to happen.”
Not sure I can actually agree with that, at least in such broad strokes.
And no, I know that it is not just a dog and pony show. "It" is the reason air travel is as safe as it is today, and that is way saver than 20 or 30 years ago, despite whatever Boeing did with the 737 MAX.
Yes, it is. And 20-30 years ago it was saver than, say, 50 years ago. Like in medcine, people don't always see those incrementle improvements over time.
I would've agreed with you five or so years ago but https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/305868 is more than an accident, you begin to wonder what's going on. There are staff shortages everywhere, why not with pilots? Are they as rested and trained as they ought to be? Together with the plane safety issues surfacing like an army of skeletons falling out of an infinite closet, I am not so sure we are on the same track as we were before.
Yes, the tendency is not great. Besides the Boeing issues, there is a tendency in pilot training and flight operations I don't like, e.g. more flight hours, tough shift planning, training to be paid for the junior pilots. That being said, I'm on the production / design / maintenance side of things, and not operations, so my opinion on that is just that, an opinion.
>Nothing will happen because the government is in bed with these folks and they don’t implicate their own
Even if they're bed with each other, the people in government are sitting at an infinitely longer lever. They'll throw the Boeing folks under the bus as soon as it is politically expedient and replace them with a different set of cronies.
Why would currently anybody globally trust FAA? Clearly regulatory capture has happened, its not 1 or 2 isolated cases at this point.
Trust is something thats hard earned and easily lost, they already went through both so if FAA wants to come back they have some serious effort on their shoulders in upcoming decade at least.
And slapping Boeing and those responsible so hard that wall will give them another is mandatory first step since this theatre is played out for literally everybody in the world, everybody is watching.
You are pinting to a very serious issue. Up until the 737 MAX, if someone or something had FAA or EASA certification, getting the other one was more or less just a formality. And this helped everyone a lot, and in fact made things saver as the engineering was less, constraint, limited, bothered by regulation (no idea how to phrase this...), because they only had to worry deeply about either FAA or EASA requirements. The 737 MAX did put a dent in this, and that was and is a problem.
And everyone knows this, besides Boeing it seems, which is the reason why I am cautiosly optimistic about the investogations.
It is certified by both, with EASA nasically accepting the FAA certication at face value (oversimplified a bit). That means trusting the other agency. It was this trust that was hurt by the initial B737 MAX scandle and the handling of it by both, Boeing and the FAA.
Ah, I see, thanks. So the FAA cut corners when certifying?
I guess trust only works when the other agency is up to the same standards as you, but then "certified by the FAA and the EASA" only really means "certified by one of the two".
No, the FAA didn't cut corners, Boeing did. The FAA did a bad job catching it.
And being certified by both means that orgs and aircraft are certified by both. Decades of cooperation and alignment of regulations and requirements mean that the sevond certification is covering the delta between both, believing the common stuff to be properly cerified by the other regulator. That is where the FAA lost trust.
Hence my believe the FAA will not show much liniency to Boeing this time.
Regardless of whether flying is safer or not, the citation is incorrect: a passenger on Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 died in 2018 following a contained engine failure.
You think the crashes of the two 737 MAX being outside of the US was not luck, but determined at least in part by the FAA? Would you care to explain how you came to this conclusion, as I really, really don't see it...
His comments point to borderline racist statements from boeing early in the saga where they tried to blame this all on incompetence of the Ethiopian/other pilots, maintenance crew and so on.
To some folks human lives don't have the same value but it depends highly on passport, as long as stuff happens outside of their border all is fine (although in this case nothing is since this affects everybody everywhere). I wouldn't expect such a comment here in 2024 but here we are.
