The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee report on the Boeing 737 Max scorches the manufacturer and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for cost-cutting, reckless speed, and lax oversight, that led to the deaths of 346 people in two airliner crashes. Are Conservatives fundamentally wrong? In other words, does capitalist greed kill and could more government regulation save lives?
Background Resource:
House Report Condemns Boeing and F.A.A. in 737 Max Disasters
[The New York Times, September 16, 2020]
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Bill Whittle Network · 737 Max Report Scorches: Does Capitalist Greed Kill, and Government Regulation Save Lives?
15 replies on “737 Max Report Scorches: Does Capitalist Greed Kill, and Government Regulation Save Lives?”
A friend of mine flew with foreign airlines for a number of years. He said that, unlike US copilots he had turned the controls over to, his hands NEVER strayed far from the yoke with foreign copilots. With foreign copilots, he quite often had to resume control of the plane. When he retired, he had over 40,000 hours without accident or mishap.
Regardless of Boeing’s recent problems, I would still rather fly Boeing than Airbus. And, I don’t know a single pilot who feels otherwise.
Mike Rowe thinks we place too much of an emphasis on safety. If you haven’t read/watched him discuss this, you should.
Bill,
I overheard a conversation between a person who professed to be an aeronautical engineer and another person.
The engineer opined that the reason that the 737s were crashing was that the upgraded engines (which were larger than the original) required the pylons to move forward and up to accommodate them. That this moved the center of thrust of the engines and affected the way that the plane responded to increased throttle. In effect, causing the nose to pitch up when power was applied. That the flight management system didn’t seem to be programmed to compensate for this.
Now, I have a degree in aviation technology, and understand weight and balance forces in a dynamic airframe, so this seems to make sense to me. But I’m not an engineer or a pilot.
My questions for you are: Have you heard this theory? Do you have any knowledge or experience to support this? Is it logical from a piloting perspective? Or is it FOD?
Yes that’s the root cause. Boeing executives insisted on using an off-the-shelf fuel-efficient engine for the 737-max that was larger than all previous 737 engines. They did that to rush the 737-max into production to compete against an in-production Airbus aircraft. Salesmen overruled engineers. Engineers were ordered to make a too-large engine work on the 737.
I remember any early e-mail from those closer to Boeing that pointed the cause from moving HQ from the Seattle are (engineering centered) to Chicago (bean counter centered) and the test flights had pointed out the problem but the bean counters overfilled them.
At work, we’ve all been through the Safe Start program to enhance safety and reduce critical errors.
Four states of mind that lead to critical errors are:
Of the four, complacency is the hardest to recognize when you’re in the middle of it.
Perhaps one way to reduce (but probably not eliminate) complacency is to purposefully plan to move people around to different assignments every 3, 4, or 5 years (i.e., real career planning). Moving into a new (even if reasonably similar) assignment helps keep you fresh, challenged, and able to ask those “newbie” questions like “why do we do it that way” and “has anyone ever thought about”? AKA real diversity! From the company perspective their total human capital increases and they still have backup resources to fill in when vacations or attrition occur in the person’s prior assignment(s).
That would be a plan.
“Complacency” in the Safe Start program, is the attitude of “I’ve skipped this step a thousand times and it hasn’t bitten me in the ass yet.” Which of course, it never will. Until it does.
Corporate level complacency probably needs the reshuffling. And it’s something that may have to come from the top. Someone has to be willing to say “Maria’s the best manager we’ve ever had in Aerodynamics, but we can’t be afraid of moving her to Metallurgy and bringing in someone else in order to keep them both on the ball.”
A small company does that kind of thing because it has to. Boeing would have to do it by choice.
In our system of capitalism all large corporations acquire this disease of complacency. It is the vital nature of our system. This is the cycle that brings the big companies down to be replaced by new ones. No company is to big to fail and the government should almost never prop these organizations up. The invisible hand is hard at work.
I remember Bill talking about this on TSL a couple of years ago after the crashes. The scuttlebut he reported (not verified) was that the software feature was meant for inexperienced pilots in other countries and was actually disabled for planes in the U.S., and that’s why the U.S. pilots didn’t know about it, because it wasn’t really there.
If Boeing isn’t allowed to introduce measures to compensate for poorly-trained pilots flying their aircraft, then the only thing Boeing can do is to start pricing for other countries to include pilot training for any new aircraft. In other words, contractual language to the effect that delivery of the aircraft will not happen until every pilot or 90% of the pilots working for the airline or entity taking delivery has passed training at Boeing’s facility, blah, blah, blah.
That wouldn’t cover pilots hired subsequently, except that they’d have to re-up for every plane delivered. (It also wouldn’t address downstream sales.)
Doesn’t Boeing already do that? What further regulation or inspection could solve the problem? Don’t think there is one, but that won’t stop the anti-capitalists.
Except if the country in question is one with Islam as its predominant ideological culture, then all such training should be performed in said country, not anywhere in the USA. And training simulators being installed in that country should probably be included in the overall contract. Maybe the pilots trained in their country would have to come to the US or to a European center for a day or two to demonstrate their mastery of the training and receive final certification/ credentialing, but no multi-week stay overs. They may also already be allowed to fly plans from overseas into the US, but that is a different type of risk (hopefully with other types of safe guards in place).
Before I begin to listen to this latest installment of “How To Piss Off David Pimentel and Other Commentary Tactics”, I will answer the questions posed.
NO!
NO!
HELL NO!
Even when capitalism occasionally kills, extreme government (Communism for one) kills FAR more.