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Email from Boeing to Ethiopian Airlines Sheds Light on a Tragic Crash (seattletimes.com) 52

Boeing received an email from the chief pilot at Ethiopian Airlines on December 1, 2018 with several questions, reports the New York Times (alternate URL here). "in essence the pilot was asking for direction. If we see a series of warnings on the new 737 Max, he posed, what do we do?" What ensued was an email conversation among a number of Boeing senior officials about whether they could answer the pilot's questions without violating international restrictions on disseminating information about a crash while it was still under investigation. That restriction was in play because a 737 Max flown by Lion Air had crashed a few weeks earlier leaving Indonesia. The inquiry from Ethiopian Airlines would prove chillingly prescient because just months later one of its 737s would go down because of a flight control malfunction similar to the one that led to the Lion Air crash. The Ethiopian Airlines crash would kill everyone on board and leave questions about whether Boeing had done everything it could to inform pilots of what it had learned about the malfunction and how to handle it.

In response to the inquiry from Ethiopian Airlines, Boeing's chief pilot, Jim Webb, proposed to his colleagues that he thank the airline for attending a previous briefing on the flight control system, called MCAS, but otherwise decline to answer the pilot's first two questions and just refer the airline to training materials and previously issued guidance. Most of those on the email agreed.

Boeing's eventual response? "I can only address the current system and the Operations Manual Bulletin. The first two questions directly relate to the accident scenario; therefore, I will be unable to address them here." The Times adds that Boeing's chief pilot Jim Webb then "ended the email by stating that if airline officials had any additional questions about the bulletin and system, they should feel free to reach out....

"It is impossible to know whether any pilots with Ethiopian Arlines would have acted differently if Webb's reply had been more forthcoming. But Boeing's limited response to an airline seeking help highlights a missed opportunity to collaborate on safety and to pass along lessons Boeing had collected following the Lion Air jet's crash into the Java Sea on Oct. 29, 2018."
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Email from Boeing to Ethiopian Airlines Sheds Light on a Tragic Crash

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  • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @05:18PM (#64898291)

    No one is sitting in jail over this.

    • No one is sitting in jail over this.

      This can take a lot of time. Air France AF447 crashed off coast of Brazil in June 2009 nearly 10 years before the Ethiopian, and is still pending trial (in appeal).

      • No one is sitting in jail over this.

        This can take a lot of time. Air France AF447 crashed off coast of Brazil in June 2009 nearly 10 years before the Ethiopian, and is still pending trial (in appeal).

        10 years worth of appeal abuse, isn’t exactly an answer.

        If jail time is the goal, sounds like those on the accusing end, have a goal too. Convict me after I’m dead.

    • Re:And yet (Score:5, Informative)

      by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @05:54PM (#64898363)
      Corporate executives are treated as existing on a legal plane above the common human. They are shielded from all culpability unless the corporate state banishes them first. Like medieval nobles or priests.
      • Let's also not forget the shareholders, who are free to invest in anything without doing any homework to find out if they are operating illegally and/or unethically since they are shielded from liability for the actions that they are enabling and profiting from.

        • Accountability is tantamount to socialism. As a devout Christian capitalist, we believe that "Do as thou will" should be the whole of the law!

      • by nazrhyn ( 906126 )
        We should start treating them like they're in a Boeing plane above the common human...
        • It does seem interesting that Boeing has no appreciable stake in Gulfstream, and yet Gulfstream is where all these trust-fund babies lay their little heads between Jackson Hole and DC.
    • Re:And yet (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Monday October 28, 2024 @07:56AM (#64899487) Journal

      well look - regulations and compliance already created a perverse incentive to not answer questions operators raised. You want to add potential jail time to the things engineers and company pilots are thinking about when they decide how to interface clients!

      There whole aviation safety culture was designed around getting people to speak up by ensuring it was not punitive to do so directly or indirectly. That breaks down at some point thought because ultimately spotting a problem may mean grounding planes and a lot of rework and that costs money and it means bonuses are impacted etc. I am not sure there is a fix but threatening people with jail will create more cover ups, not less. If create a situation where, saying something might mean spending 5 years in the clink, even if not saying something might result in 25 to life if ultimately caught and convicted, a large portion of people will chose silence!

      Ultimately all those boils down to cost decisions somewhere. REGULATION is what made it so appealing to try modify an old design and rig obscure its actual flight characteristics to make it seem like the prior product in the first place. "REGULATORS tried and people died" is a very valid way to look at this entire incident. It does not matter if it is safety or anything else if you want people to do the right thing you need to keep the cost of compliance lower than the cost * risk of calamity.

      We made it (apparently) cheaper to design and build a bad plane, than design and certify a good one.

    • When this information came to light, it resulted in Boeing getting a criminal charge. The trial isn't over yet (I'm summarizing the article here).
  • by Retired Chemist ( 5039029 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @05:38PM (#64898333)
    This is what happens when lawyers get involved.
  • What ensued was an email conversation among a number of Boeing senior officials about whether they could answer the pilot's questions without violating international restrictions on disseminating information about a crash while it was still under investigation.

    Yea sure ..

    Newly revealed correspondence indicates that a Boeing senior official counseled that the company could answer a pilot’s safety question, but it did not.

    a. What was the name of this senior Boeing of
    • From TFA:

      "What ensued was an email conversation among a number of Boeing senior officials about whether they could answer"
      "Jim Webb, proposed to his colleagues that he [...] decline to answer the pilot’s first two questions"
      "Most of those on the email agreed."

      Everybody on the email list is called "Boeing senior official" and at least one of them disagreed. Boeing can use that to say "a Boeing senior official counseled ..."

    • In response to the inquiry from Ethiopian Airlines, Boeing's chief pilot, Jim Webb, proposed to his colleagues that he thank the airline for attending a previous briefing on the flight control system, called MCAS, but otherwise decline to answer the pilot's first two questions and just refer the airline to training materials and previously issued guidance. Most of those on the email agreed.

      I would have quit.

      I would have quit, in protest, and printed out the E-mail chain that showed I alerted management to the problem and their responses.

      Because I've done that.

      Used to work in the airline industry, writing software for instruments that went into Boeing airplanes and a few others. (But not actually the Boeing company.)

      The one thing that weighed heavily on my mind, pretty much every day and with every paragraph of code, was that if there's a mistake it would cost the lives of 250+ people. Lots an

  • by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @06:02PM (#64898379)

    "if airline officials had any additional questions about the bulletin and system, they should feel free to reach out...."

    "We'll be happy to not answer those as well!"

  • by Wolfling1 ( 1808594 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @06:33PM (#64898429) Journal
    Its problematic when the ethically correct thing would be to violate the regulations.

    A bigger man would have sent the data and damned the regulations. He would have paid the price, but slept well.

    Instead, he chose to accept the regulations (or maybe even hide behind them).

    Seems that Boeing isn't staffed with bigger men. Its staffed with lesser ones.
    • A bigger man would have sent the data and damned the regulations. He would have paid the price, but slept well.

      Presumably the executives slept well anyway.

      • A bigger man would have sent the data and damned the regulations. He would have paid the price, but slept well.

        Presumably the executives slept well anyway.

        As long as they profit they will always sleep well.

    • Taking action would have created other issues though. I imagine the real issue was giving NTSB more rope to hang them.

      • by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

        Taking action would have created other issues though.

        Like what? Some more slaps on the wrist? Share potentially useless information that doesn't help? These "other issues" could not have been worse than an entire plane full of people dying. As shitty as Boeing is, they're only partly at fault. The International Civil Aviation Organization under the United Nations are the ones that created these international restrictions (on top of any individual country's restrictions, if applicable, for these exact events). Boeing seemingly didn't ask for permission or othe

    • This is very easy to conclude afterwards. There needs to be a broad consensus on the cause and remedies before you start spewing out advice. That remedy of course should have been there before the first jet took off. Even a noob like me could have predicted this would go wrong eventually.
    • You're oversimplifying the situation and declaring there was clearly a "right" thing to do. But regulations generally exist for a reason. Otherwise you could just pitch the whole mess out of the window and make a 1 pager that says, "Do whatever you think is right."

    • Why is there a "gag order" to not discuss ongoing investigations? How many times has it been said the purpose of investigating crashes is to ensure it doesn't happen again? What possible reason would there be to not disseminate possibly crucial safety information?
    • The ethically correct thing would have been to ground all 737 MAXs until the problem was understood. It took a second crash for that to happen.
  • ... had crashed a few weeks earlier ...

    That's wasn't a reason for NTSB or Boeing to demand that all 737 Max aircraft be grounded. After the second crash (Ethiopian Airlines), all those aircraft were grounded.

    When a door-plug fell off, in 2024, the planes were immediately grounded. Mostly because of evidence that Boeing's self-certify status was being abused.

    • by Locutus ( 9039 )
      IIRC the NTSB was not requiring the grounding of the 737Max in the US while across the world others were grounding it. Boeing was still toting the line that the two crashes were pilot error and a training problem. NOT the fact that their control system was based on a single sensor and they'd greatly increased the elevator response from just the trim tabs to the actual elevator.

      And all this was because they Max had much larger engines which would have been too close to the ground mounted the same as the 737
  • In the aviation environment, safety is above everything. If you respond to a request for information regarding safety, and your response is deemed appropriate to increase the safety of flights, you're off the hook. If you fail to respond and this failure increases the risk of an accident, you're now, or should be in trouble. I have undergone significant training in aviation safety, and this non-response by Boeing seems to clearly violate what I learned.
  • Boeing is the new General Motors

    The infamous 1950’s GM quote:

    "what’s good for General Motors is good for America"

    GM will be lucky to survive as a whole after the EV transition.

    BOEING will just reinforce its stranglehold lobby on WashDC, DOD and milk the commercial airliner duopoly to death

  • On Odd Justification (Score:5, Interesting)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Monday October 28, 2024 @11:16AM (#64900049)

    But in essence the pilot was asking for direction. If we see a series of warnings on the new 737 Max, he posed, what do we do?

    What ensued was an email conversation among a number of Boeing senior officials about whether they could answer the pilot’s questions without violating international restrictions on disseminating information about a crash while it was still under investigation.

    The problem is that Ethiopian Airlines wasn't asking about the previous crash, it was asking how to respond to a bunch of warning lights related to MCAS. It sounds like the Boeing execs thought the question was triggered by the the Lion Air crash and that triggered their "say nothing" mode, but there was no reason for that to happen. The proper response would have been to give the information that was requested without talking about Lion Air.

    I think Boeing execs just got obsessed with the letter of some of these internal regs and forgot their ultimate purpose was to deliver safe airplanes to their customers.

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