Summary
Whistleblowers at Boeing allege widespread safety lapses, including missing or defective parts and improper assembly practices, driven by pressure to maintain production schedules.
A January incident where a door panel blew off a new 737-9 Max mid-flight has sparked investigations, with insiders like Sam Mohawk revealing that thousands of faulty parts may have been installed on planes.
Other whistleblowers describe similar concerns over quality control failures, managerial indifference, and retaliation for speaking out.
Boeing denies safety risks but faces ongoing FAA investigations amid heightened scrutiny over its practices.
That’s what happens when you tie people’s bonuses directly to how many planes they push out the door. You optimize for production quantity at the cost of everything else.
Let’s ignore Boeing for a second, because this is an interesting problem. Our society rewards production and accepting that, I’m not sure getting planes “out the door” is inherently bad.
It seems to me the issue lies in how to reward the auditors. I think we’d all agree this responsibility should ultimately be a Gov’t function… but internal quality assurance is a thing too. So, how does a company reward this team of auditors? E.x., Finding more errors naively seems like the correct metric. However, their bonus would then go down with program effectiveness- that is, fewer errors/faults based on adversarial competition between the production team and the auditing team would lead to fewer findings (presumably).
Management bonuses is a whole other issue. Then, who should oversee this entire program of rewards to ensure it’s systematically safe for the public? Assuming we accept the premise that rewards are desired.
Boeing doesn’t reward their auditors (called QA Inspectors in aviation). They’ve been cutting down their numbers and replacing them with much less experienced people at much lower pay for many years.
Yes, that’s why I said let’s ignore Boeing. I’m asking for the “correct” solution to this problem.
The more I think about it, I think the adversarial nature of auditing must come from the Government side. Which is precisely why Boeing became an issue.
There is an option where independent teams of auditors review the product, and the team with the most findings gets a bonus. Perhaps this could be considered. But again, who’s job is it to ensure this overall program is safe for the public? That’s not the manufacturer, especially a corporation. We already know the courts have ruled corpos only responsibility is to current stock holders and short term gains.
“The team with the most findings.” Lol
“Here are your audit reports. We’ve made them extra spicy this month, just like you like it.”
Reward the entire company when the recall numbers get lower and the safety in the air numbers get higher. Have a culture where someone saying that something isn’t right is a good thing, not punished. This could be done through the training of managers and open door policies. People don’t always need financial compensation. Telling an employee that they’re appreciated for finding and fixing issues can go a really long way.
And this is why “the free market will solve everything” is naive, at best.
It is not a zero sum game where QA is red teaming production and so forth. The execs (and anyone with stock) benefits from “planes out the door”. There is zero reason to incentivize QA/QC and… they don’t.
The part that proponents gloss over about the “the market will solve everything” is that people die first. Boeing puts out very bad planes that kill people, then they fail. The cereal company puts arsenic in food and kills people, then they fail, on and on. We know this is how the market works, because that’s how it used to work before we regulated it.
The market alone is an executioner, and everyone rallying for it doesnt think they will be next.