I'm always surprised at how many non-tech people don't know about their browser's ability to search in the page. I've been on multiple calls at work with researchers who have been in the field for more than a decade and they'll read the entire page instead of hitting ctrl-f.
I have a Chevy Volt (second gen). It looks like a normal car, has a 50-mile range on the battery and also has a gas engine. The passenger and luggage area are pretty normal, maybe the center rear seat isn't usable, but it isn't really usable in most sedans. I really want a previous-gen sized Ford Ranger or current Ford Maverick with the same battery range.
IMHO the Maverick hybrid is a phenomenal vehicle. I've averaged 460+ miles per tank of gas (13.8 gal and I don't run it to E). The 2025 looks better all around except IMHO the bigger screen.
I've watched a few review videos on the Maverick and while it does seem like the closest replacement for my (now totaled) Ford Ranger, I still wish it was a plugin/range extended drive train. It's nice not having to stop at a gas station except for when I'm on road trips 2-3 times a year.
> Maybe this is Boeing's way of slowing down Dragon capsule dockings?
I'm gonna go with Hanlon's razor here. The Starliner team seems to have enough trouble just getting a single Starliner to the ISS without issues, I can't imagine they're capable of devising a malicious plan to interfere with a competitor.
Make sure you're not memorizing each letter's dits and dahs, that'll make it much harder to receive and transmit morse code at faster speeds. Better to learn the general "sound" of each character, often using a Koch method trainer.
Implementing a mental dit/dah decoder + lookup table is the shortest path to being able to decode written CW ` _ . ___ _ ` but it will cause you problems trying to receive faster CW since you can't count, assemble, lookup fast enough to receive at more than 5-8WPM. And even then you are generally doing "keyboard copy" where you write down the letters as you hear them and then go back to actually read the message you received later.
+1 to this. I started learning Morse with that same Google site and it's optimizing for reading, not hearing. Took me time to unlearn everything and do it properly.
I am a window seat fan not because I can look out the window (although I generally do on ascent/descent) but because when I pass out in economy I don't end up resting my head on my seat mate's shoulder :)
To me the allure of the window seat has less to do with the window and more to do with what the window implies. I.e. it could just as well be called "the wall seat" and I'd get 95% the utility out of it.
Wasn't there some concept in airplane interior design to put displays in the walls so you could virtually display the outside like the aircraft wasn't even there?
A company that produces a device that fakes GPS (with extremely weak RF so as not to draw the ire of FCC or other government bodies) to convince the phone it is in Europe.
Seems like Boeing might not have the documentation the NTSB is requesting[1], even though they say they do keep that documentation. I wonder if Boeing doesn't want to admit that for some legal reason, maybe they don't have a lot of documentation they say they should have.
" I wonder if Boeing doesn't want to admit that for some legal reason, maybe they don't have a lot of documentation they say they should have. "
This would be a bad legal strategy. Playing this through as a lawyer:
1. You will be asked to produce it in a lawsuit
2. It will come out it does not exist but should.
3. You will be absolutely and totally excoriated in the lawsuit, in the court of public opinion, and by your regulators.
4. You will prolong the news cycle of your malicious belligerence, and it may even spike higher when it comes out the docs don't exist but should.
5. You will be forced to settle the lawsuit at very high cost, and because you were totally belligerent, you will be regulated much harder, which has a higher-than-the-lawsuit cost most likely
Meanwhile, admitting you are missing shit you should not be, because the contractors played games (or even if it is just you):
1. You will be forced to settle the lawsuit at high cost
2. You will be less excoriated because you owned up to your failure, and because you look more like a bumbling company instead of belligerent and malicious.
3. You will probably be regulated more, but probably less than you did in the first scenario because of #2
The net expected value of the first strategy is much lower than the second.
They can't prevent themselves from losing or being excoriated, they can only try to make it have less cost.
This sounds like a case of Schrödinger's documentation: it may or may not exist. I think Boeing is still looking for it and doesn't want to admit they don't have it until they're absolutely, positively certain they don't.
Time is running out, and the situation doesn't make them look good, but it seems they're not ready to abandon hope just yet.
> This sounds like a case of Schrödinger's documentation: it may or may not exist. I think Boeing is still looking for it and doesn't want to admit they don't have it until they're absolutely, positively certain they don't.
I can imagine that for each plane could exist millions of documents, hidden away on different servers. Best-case scenario they could claim that a subcontractor was order to create it and lost it.
From experience I saw a company where people would have single copies of documents stored on hard drives, personal cloud drives, memory sticks, etc. They were always able to find what they needed, but there were a few close calls.
This is where being under so much pressure to produce the documentation, somebody ends up magic-ing it into existence. I wonder if they even have a chain of custody that would highlight that forms, etc, were retroactively created?
I am an investigative reporter, and I take the same approach toward public records. If it ever existed in digital form, there is almost always a stray copy somewhere — regardless of the agency’s records retention schedule. The challenge is figuring out where it is.
Just to point out that, despite the natural state of documentation being a superposition of "exists" and "doesn't exist", for that specific one there is a relative short (hundreds of pages) manual that says in no misleading terms exactly where the documents must be.
Just speaking from my experience here: I worked for a company that was comparable in role to Boeing. I was prohibited from retaining any documentation about my work that was not court ordered. Files, notes, emails, scribbles on a napkin all of it had to be destroyed.
Having a friend who has represented whistleblowers, etc, yes, this happens.
Sometimes for good reason (you are on a classified project, etc).
Sometimes for bad reason (we don't want anyone to be able to prove anything).
The latter is something bad lawyers suggest. It basically never works to get the company off the hook. I'm not going to say "never never", but most of the time it leads to a situation where it's easy to convince a jury you are malicious and evil.
Even without a jury, i will simply put your peers who don't do that on the stand and make you look like you have a non-standard policy of hiding things.
Or i'll find the human who asked why.
Because in any company of any size, people eventually ask each other why they are being asked to do this, and someone will say the wrong thing ("You know why we do this"). Most of them will not lie for the company because they don't buy it either.
etc
This sort of hiding strategy goes wrong in many many ways, and only goes "right" in a remarkably small set of circumstances.
But when you are malicious and evil, stopping outsiders from learning to what level, is actually useful. Because there is ambiguity in "they destroyed evidence, so they had something to hide" vs "they have documentation proving they are two Hitlers in a trenchcoat"
It did not happen when they lied about the 737 Max problem even after a first crash, causing another hundred deaths, the CEO retired with a bonus of 60 million dollars, the current Boeing CEO was already part of the Board then, and will happen now because of some ... papirology?
"...Boeing has admitted that it knew about a problem with its 737 Max jets a year before the aircraft was involved in two fatal accidents, but took no action..."
If you watched the Netflix documentary you will know the conduct was much worst than that. After the first accident, and before the second accident, the Boeing CEO went on CNBC saying the airplane was safe when they were already aware of the problem. To me it looks like cause for manslaughter charges at a minimum, but maybe that is why I am not a lawyer...
I would say 'that is an unethical but 'reasonable' strategy for a rich CEO or whatever as an individual' (where reasonable here is 'probably would work' not 'morally sound').
It is an unreasonable one for the company as the company.
Speaking as a lawyer, we’re not incentivized to advise a course of action whose primary purpose would be to line our own pockets. Doing so would cause us to lose trust in our clients and could possibly subject us to disciplinary action. We are expected to act in our clients’ best interest, not our own.
I’m obviously not Boeing’s attorney, but given the industry they’re in and the amount of scrutiny they’re under, they don’t need their lawyers to fabricate situations that drive up their billables. They’re quite busy enough already.
Not sure if this was edited in later, but it's in the article:
> Boeing also acknowledged the possibility that the documents the NTSB is seeking may not exist.
> "If the door plug removal was undocumented there would be no documentation to share," Greenwood said in his statement. "We will continue to cooperate fully and transparently with the NTSB's investigation."
In which case the NTSB will hopefully pin the blame on the lack of a functioning system of record that tracks such events.
It’s a big deal because aviation is one of those highly regulated industries where the documentation not existing is it self a crisis level event. Like VW emissions scandal bad. That’s if it never caused a single incident, which it obviously has.
> I fly a 40-year-old Cessna. If someone replaced a light bulb in 1982, I have a record of it.
How surprising that hobbyist act like hobbyist. When real money gets involved, all of sudden inconvenient things no longer are "critical" so no documentation is needed for them. What a coincidence...
I worked on airplanes in the long ago. You have to trust that people document every bit of their work and get an inspector to sign off on it where required and get in process inspections sometimes too depending on the work. Nobody who does undocumented work on an airplane should be employed.
If you have a culture in a highly regulated industry where workers can violate those regulations and you dont notice by intention or by inaction, then yes you can be held responsible.
But what if there's absolutely no documented process involving those bolts at all? Its perfectly reasonable to ask what the process is and who is responsible. Boeing acknowledges they don't have an answer here. Is it because they never had a process for those bolts to begin with? You can't document following a process (or not following one) when there is no process at all.
The process to do something undocumented could be to plan and write down what you are about to do, record the before during and after states file the documents.
Alternately the process should be to do nothing until the system studies the action and defines the process. But even then you have a proofing run where you probably should have extra documentation. And arguably in a high safety environment- this would be preferred.
Back upstream to the source of the problem, too much rework was already being required by the time the components got to the Boeing assembly plant (i.e. the Spirit techs onsite doing repairs).
In an environment where process exceptions are the norm, people begin to deprioritize handling exceptions properly. Everything can't be critical or emergency all the time.
And once that deprioritization happens, safety critical process exceptions begin being treated like all other exceptions. Because they're all exceptions, and there are so many.
And eventually normalization of out of bounds situations via repeated team exposure leads to catastrophe.
NASA lost two shuttles via the same organizational problem.
That’s all very true, but just a casual opinion, I think Boeing's process problem is more one driven by prioritization of profits with management corroding the safety culture vs nasa procedural breakdown missing risks because of routine complacency of many previous launches.
> You have to trust your workers to not undo some random bolts here and there at some stage.
Why? We don't trust surgeons to remove correct limbs, why we should trust some contractors thrice removed from actual accountability? There are checklists for a reason.
so its worth clarifying something because 'plug door' is a confusing term as it relates to the bolts. The issue here isn't about trusting workers to do things, its about systems and processes to ensure they know what the right thing to do is and they know how to do it correctly. You CAN (and SHOULD) use things like checklists to ensure people do each job correctly. There are tens of thousands of 'jobs' in an assembly like this - no one knows/remembers exactly how to do each one correctly, nor should a system expect rely on them doing so. Here's how that happens without anyone doing something 'random' and following their instructions as they understand them:
There are doors on an aircraft - you enter through them, they have inflatable slides attached. Then there are plugs - plugs that fill a space (this is one, there are a lot, basically any penetration of the pressure vessel). If there were a space where a door could be but isn't on this model, you need to plug it (hence, door plug or...plug door). In terms of assembly, maintenance, operation, etc. they have different functions and those functions have different documentation and traceability requirements. Doors are meant to be opened and closed - that is different from being removed (i.e., 'taking the door off its hinge'). That leaves us here:
* Doors can be opened and closed (this does not require documentation because it is part of the normal function)
* Doors can be removed, which is different from opened and closed (requires documentation because it is not part of its normal function, requires inspection after reinstallation)
* Plugs cannot be opened and closed (opening and closing them is not part of their normal function so...to whit...doing so is impossible within the vocabulary/concept of documentation rules, they are not designed for regular use)
* Plugs can only be REMOVED (documentation required, inspection required just like a door removal)
Where does that leave the door plug? is undoing the bolts and pushing it up off the stop blocks opening it or is it removal? In the minds of Boeing and the FAA - that is removal. In the minds of line workers, opened a door.
Suddenly, door plug and plug door become potentially different concepts. One is a plug for a door and is discussed and documented like a plug. The other is a door that serves the purpose of a plug...and is discussed and documented like a door. What seems to have happened is that workers opened the plug , which isn't 'possible' - meaning they 'removed' the plug and treated it like opening it. That meant it didn't trigger anything about a required set of procedures to do so, didn't trigger inspection, didn't trigger documentation, didn't trigger inspection, just got closed up and moved down the line.
I've dealt with a lot of these...a personal favorite was a company I worked with having someone who couldn't read be responsible for recording each serial number he stamped on each federally tracked part in our factory. He relied on his memory of the last serial number he did the day before.
> In the minds of Boeing and the FAA - that is removal. In the minds of line workers, opened a door.
If they really do allow line workers to interpret federal regulations themselves, that's quite a problem. But I doubt this was a decision made by someone that turns a wrench.
It’s not about interpretation it’s about ignorance. Where they trained in the difference between a door and a plug? Did they realize it was a door plug and not plug door? Interpretation requires awareness that you are interpreting and that is a surprisingly high bar.
It’s in the article (and every other article written about this debacle).
The plug was of course installed when the plane was delivered, otherwise there would have been a door-sized hole in the side of the plane when it was delivered.
The bolts of the plug were probably originally installed, but some rework was required in the area during final assembly, which required the plug to be removed and put back, and during that process the bolts were not reinstalled. It’s (lack of) documentation of that removal-and-reinstallation that are the subject of the article we are discussing here.
What I have read varies. Some say the door plug was installed and bolted. Some say the door plug was installed but not bolted. Some say the door plug wasn't installed - which I suspect from a lot of prior experience is a linguistic gap between engineers and reporters on installed but not bolted.
I remember reading but can't find at the moment something suggesting that inspecting the door plugs and the bolts was a required Boeing assembly line 'job' (think 'ticket'). But none of that matters if someone, as has been reported, later uninstalled the bolts to fix something else, without creating a record of doing so, because they misunderstood the specific procedure they were undertaking.
Finding someone to blame isn’t the point. That’s for the influencers, politicians and armchair commentators. Engineers should seek to find solutions; the NTSB and FAA have a terrific track record in this respect.
There are two companies and multiple teams involved. It sounds like this is a process gap. One company has a process that states to remove and reinstall the doors but doesn't mention checking torque. Second company takes over and their procedure states to check fitment but not torque.
Something like that is likely what's happening here.
That's quite plausible, but at some level in the hierarchy, there is someone who has the responsibility of not letting things fall through the cracks - if no-one else, then it is the CEO.
If outsourcing is a de facto means of avoiding responsibility, then guess what the consequences are.
It is not sufficient, in itself, to prevent a recurrence, but adjusting the incentives to encourage preventative measures is a time-honored and generally effective way of getting results. It is more effective than shrugging one's shoulders and saying "It's so complicated! It can't be helped..."
The current one's only been CEO for four years; the structural problems presumably are older. Like, they probably _should_ consider losing the CEO, but that in itself is not going to fix anything.
Dave Calhoun was a member of the Board of Directors loooooooong before he was crowned CEO. Since 2009. Dave knows where all of the bodies are buried. In fact, he was on the board, and it’s lead director, when the 346 bodies of the Lion Air and Ethiopian passengers were buried. The man has blood on his hands.
The CEO has been on the board for much longer than 4 years though. And I agree that losing the CEO isn’t going to fix things. But putting leadership there that places safety above share value will. And the CEO is part of that leadership that needs to change.
That does seem most likely. The putative insider blog post about the production incident essentially said the same thing: the contractors/managers were exploiting a loophole to avoid recording the work in such a way that it would trigger a required review step (or somesuch, I forget the details). Not a big leap from there to "didn't get recorded at all", and from there to "lots of other stuff isn't recorded either".
Their situation feels analogous to my memories of the initial offshoring boom in tech, when you could pitch plans that didn't factor time zone or QA into the budget and nobody cared.
Homendy is NTSB, not Boeing. As far as I can tell, Boeing has not admitted top not knowing, nor have they provided the documentation.
I recall reading (probably a Twitter thread) a while back that showed entries in one Spirit Aero work logging system that showed the plug had been unbolted, and that there was no corresponding entry in the QA system that's required whenever a plug is removed. My gut feel its that someone was rule-bending, and they probably unbolted and slid the plug out of the way of the rivet holes they needed to fix, but didn't want to admit to "opening" the plug and having the QA audit records and self justified that they "didn't actually open it" when they unbolted and moved it (and failed to rebolt it when they put it back).
(Terminology as described further upthread at that link: CMES is an official record system for the plane. SAT is described as "Like Slack" and not an official record of the plane and its maintenance)
"finally we get to the damning entry which reads something along the lines of “coordinating with the doors team to determine if the door will have to be removed entirely, or just opened. If it is removed then a Removal will have to be written.” Note: a Removal is a type of record in CMES that requires formal sign off from QA that the airplane been restored to drawing requirements.
If you have been paying attention to this situation closely, you may be able to spot the critical error: regardless of whether the door is simply opened or removed entirely, the 4 retaining bolts that keep it from sliding off of the door stops have to be pulled out. A removal should be written in either case for QA to verify install, but as it turns out, someone (exactly who will be a fun question for investigators) decides that the door only needs to be opened, and no formal Removal is generated in CMES (the reason for which is unclear, and a major process failure). Therefore, in the official build records of the airplane, a pressure seal that cannot be accessed without opening the door (and thereby removing retaining bolts) is documented as being replaced, but the door is never officially opened and thus no QA inspection is required.
This entire sequence is documented in the SAT, and the nonconformance records in CMES address the damaged rivets and pressure seal, but at no point is the verification job reopened, or is any record of removed retention bolts created, despite it this being a physical impossibility."
I wonder if the system recording the actions could have knowledge of these types of dependencies between actions, so it could refuse to record a log which is physically impossible (replaced a seal that — due to a plug not being opened — you cannot physically access).
It's not clear to me - was the seal replacement documented in CMES?
Is there not some dependency tree such that a cascade of sign-offs are required when one thing is changed? Clearly, changing the seal has dependencies which should automatically be flagged.
I always felt bad for Rumsfeld (not Cheney) being the target of so much mockery for that comment. I disliked him style and decisions as Secretary of Defense, but that was one of the smartest and most realistic things he said. It's amazing to me how many people derided it as meaningless garbage when it self-evidently true and provided a worthwhile insight into the complexities of strategic decision-making.
The context is that he'd previously said we had to invade Iraq because of the imminent threat of the weapons of mass destruction.
So he's using a trivially true and non-interesting statement about "unknown unknowns" to evade questions about previous statements where he claimed to know something.
In other words, it was garbage response. He deserves mockery, scorn and a criminal trial.
His “unknown unknowns” response was, to me, a basically fair if evasive response to whether there is any evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and terrorists as far as supplying WMDs. He essentially said “we don’t know what we don’t know.”
To me the more damning answer is the follow up later in the conference, where he strongly implied that he has evidence but can’t disclose it. That just misled the public and is far worse than the “unknown unknowns” comment in my view.
You seem to have a rather stark view of the world.
I'd suggest possibly broadening it to include the possibility that people can be evil in some ways, good in others, stupid and smart, and capable and incapable.
Donald Rumsfeld is responsible for the deaths of one million innocent Iraqi civilians at the cost of 3 trillion American dollars for nothing except the enrichment of a few. I agree that every person is complicated, but any possible nuance here is completely overwhelmed by the amount of destruction. Donald Rumsfeld is absolutely evil.
You might think you are smart for hedging, but if you think killing one million innocent lives just makes a person "complicated", you've lost the plot.
On what basis are you holding Donald Rumsfeld responsible for the invasion?
If it's all on him, then wouldn't that absolve a lot of other powerful people around him, who were also pushing for it, and at least one of whom was his superior in the chain of command?
Nothing about that has anything to do with whether something he said was insightful or not. It’s possible for evil people to say smart things and for good people to say bullshit things.
It wasn't insightful (and nowhere did I say that Dondald Rumsfeld was incapable of saying something insightful). We knew then what he was trying to claim we didn't know. Even Dick Cheney said on the record (during the first Iraq War) that a full invasion would be a Vietnam style quagmire.
Rumsfeld said a smart-sounding thing he got from somewhere else, but it was just a lie. He knew the WMD claim was made up because he helped manufacture it. Iraq's non-involvement in 9/11 and our inability to accomplish regime change were "known knowns" prior to the invasion.
I have to wager that the Iraqi people probably prefer the current order of things. I would guess that they would keep things the way they are rather than bring back Saddam.
I guess that depends on what makes evilBastard evil. I don't care if evilBastard is a "great" dad. When you mastermind to commit what any rational person would call war crimes does not get white washed because they played ball with their kids on the weekends or donated a bunch of money to charity in an attempt to assuage guilt (if any were felt to begin with).
In my list of people that to me qualify as evilBastard, the Bush Admin is way worse than theZuck.
This is just frothing at the mouth. I also think Rumsfeld was a war criminal, but that has nothing to do with the epistemology of this remark. I doesn't become less true just because someone you dislike says it, that's a genetic fallacy.
who's saying the quote is less true because of the person quoting it? i claimed that the speaker is an evilBastard while stating that just because evilBastard is not any less reprehensible because they quoted a smart person.
