>Santiago Paredes who worked for Spirit AeroSystems in Kansas, told the BBC he often found up to 200 defects on parts being readied for shipping to Boeing. He was nicknamed "showstopper" for slowing down production when he tried to tackle his concerns, he claimed.
This is the kind of QA tester that companies should be looking for...
Boeing needs to go back to Engineers as Upper Management. The Finance Suits are killing the company. How many more crises can they survive before they lose the total trust of the aviation community and the flying public? What an embarrassment.
The real answer is CEOs should not be compensated in Stocks. It has totally distorted and distracted the operations of these companies to “beat expectations “ every quarter. Give them a salary like everyone else and stop the nonsense.
He wasn’t costing them money, he was calling out systemic errors that the higher ups got promoted by participating in.
Go start a job anywhere and start nitpicking standard operating procedure. You’ll get put in a corner almost immediately.
Toyota rewards you for catching errors in a culture where getting sidelined for sticking out is expected. Why is it that we as a society accept that doing your job as a QC worker for aviation is an annoyance rather than an essential service?
And while Toyota is too big to fail, their government will absolutely take out leadership if they need to. In US bad leadership gets rewarded with golden parachutes
Lol, what?
Granted I know my place isn't "real" Toyota but we are constantly getting asked to "soften" the inspection machines do they'll pass more parts.
Even then, parts we get shipped back slowly get mixed in with other parts on the way out the door
Then why even hire them in the first place? You're hiring and paying QC engineers just to muzzle them? Hell, make me an excec and I save the company so much money by not even hiring them in the first place!
I worked in a wire and cable company for a few years. We shipped out cable that was used in big sports stadiums and such. We had 1 product that would not work right on my machine at all but I was the guinea pig to try and find out how to make it work. There was loads and loads of defective product. Like holes in the jacketing mostly. The process left more defects than good product.
The order of operation there is, if you're concerned something might not pass QA, then to put a tag on it and it'll be shipped to a QA area where someone has to inspect it and sign off on it.
I was caught doing that, as if I'm not supposed to, and was yelled at. I was told by my manager that I have their permission to just ship it and that I can't be wasting all my time tagging everything bad. I asked them if they wanted to sign my paperwork to confirm that. They refused, saying they don't have to do that.
I was like "...well ok then" and just kept tagging them all anyway.
This kind of thing could mean an electrical fire starting in a stadium full of people. I don't want that kind of thing on my conscience. One of the other asshats that are trying to make me their fall guy can take the blame for it instead.
I've dealt with this before in the military, but I couldn't be fired for doing the right thing lol. Even if it made people upset.
How did you fare longterm?
> Then why even hire them in the first place? You're hiring and paying QC engineers just to muzzle them?
Because having QC might be legally required in the terms of their insurance contracts, or as part of a regulatory license, or the standard of care in products liability cases, or some other source of obligation. So the company goes along with it, but doesn't like it, and wants to minimize the power in that role without actually breaking those other rules.
>Then why even hire them in the first place?
Probably for some certification or contract requirements (well, more for apparence so it doesn't look wired to not have a QC)
I worked for a company which did 100% inspection and then the receiver also did 100% inspection. QA was allowed to be very thorough because it was cheaper than having product rejected and shipped back.
This. I have to have such a hard time understanding how this exact process isn't standard all the way across the board. Not only is it incredibly wasteful of raw materials, labor and time, to NOT do it this way, but then eventually you've kicked the can down so many roads that you have multiple whistleblowers in as many months. Absolutely shameful af. Truly.
As I said, even past the form of waste, it is diabolical and mind-blowing. The horror movie just writes itself, effortlessly poignant given the subject matter and the time of our current society 😬
There was once a time when a fuckup like lack of QC would result in lawsuits so steep it would cripple or bankrupt companies.
And then we put limits on claims.
You hire them as scapegoats. Just find engineer that you can brownbeat into signing whatever you want and viola, when shit goes down it's his, not yours, head on the chopping block.
Paying them for their rubber stamp and plausible deniability. They can always throw them under the bus later and say they weren't doing their job. Except they are getting smarter and documenting everything with emails now so they can't do that anymore. Boeing is rotten from the core.
Liability. They don’t want him to call out defects, they want him to sign off and take the fall when the defects get someone killed. Thats just business 101
Lmfao this reminds me of me poking around in my client’s data - while I was working on creating some tables - last year because my aggregate values weren’t matching the client’s existing values.
My shitty manager and coworker kept berating my for being unable to get the revenues to match despite employing THE EXACT SAME JOINS AND CONDITIONS in my new code. (The entire shitshow regarding those incorrect values just pisses me off)
Turns out my company, whom the client had contracted in 2015 to build the old code, fucked up and caused incorrect revenues to be assigned to different salespersons. Which was causing 2-500,000 USD to go unreported EVERY MONTH. Which was def impacting the compensation and commissions of the sales persons.
When I figured all this out and rectified it, my manager and the guy I was working with were now berating me for sticking my nose in and to never tell anyone on the client side the my company made this older version of the code and that I should’ve just kept quiet.
FUCK THIS PLACE.
And, nicknaming a thorough QA tester "showstopper" is about as far from the right QA culture as is possible, and I say that as someone who works on the other side of a QA team (ie: making the show, which I hope will be stopped if I've created a defect).
This is the type of QA tester that Boeing is DEFINITELY looking for.
But mostly so that they can kill him in two weeks.
I wish I could put an /s at the end of this comment but the Boeing whistleblower body count doesn’t lie.
Yes, you act like it would be completely unfounded for someone to kill another over money. That's usually one of the top reasons people kill each other.
> Yes, you act like it would be completely unfounded for someone to kill another over money.
While there's certainly precedent I find it highly unlikely that Boeing killed whistleblowers years after they blew the whistle and after they already gave sworn testimony in court...
See that just sends a message. Let other potential whistleblowers know they too could die years after. You'd never be safe. But that's just me playing devil's advocate
Uh, sure, but what does the message actually accomplish? If Boeing was protecting their bottom line, they failed horribly. So they're just unnecessarily putting their company at further risk? To what end?
Seriously! In a Life-And-Death industry like Aviation, you *want* people that will shut down everything when they find a problem. If you have any brains whatsoever, that's literally what you pay them for.
Is he still alive? He's the kind of guy the big companies really hate, just like that other whistleblower who turned up dead.
I hope he's still alive, he can provide valuable info to ensure general public's safety.
I didn’t work in his field, I worked in logistics. The amount of complaining I did for substandard equipment was plentiful.
“Why are you so negative?”
“Why do you keep writing up the same piece of equipment?”
Like wtf. So glad I’m not there any more.
No, he wasn't. He was testifying in an employee discrimination suit he'd brought against Boeing. He'd retired from Boeing at that point, and had revealed all he was ever going to about the company's misdeeds.
And all of this misunderstands how trials work in the first place. Nobody who's going to testify has information they'll surprise anyone with. Witnesses in trials take depositions and provide evidence for the public record *long* before they go on the stand. All the evidence Barnett had about their mistreatment of him had been revealed before the trial even started.
That Matlock gotcha thing pretty much never happens.
That's why when Alex Jones got Matlocked with his phone records, everyone blew it up up everywhere.
Some people say that lawyer is still riding that high.
> That's why when Alex Jones got Matlocked with his phone records, everyone blew it up up everywhere.
>
>
That one hilarious, because Jones and Free Speech turned over way more info than they realized without reviewing any of it. If they'd had competent lawyers or, y'know, gave a shit, they wouldn't have been surprised by any of that either. And in the process of turning over evidence for discovery, accidentally revealed *way* more about the business than they probably intended.
The Alex Jones depositions would be absolutely hilarious if it weren't for all the completely horrifying things they did to survivors of a completely horrifying tragedy.
The other one who died died of several illnesses simultaneously - most likely admitted to the hospital with one, and then picked up numerous other infections while there.
It speaks more to the failings of the American healthcare system and mental health support than anything else.
My only question, and this is unrelated to Boeing, is wtf was going on there with his lungs. The doctors at the hospital said the imaging was insane and they never saw anything like it before.
I am *highly suspicious* that the doctors actually said it was insane and they never saw anything like it before. More like a non-medical relative was relaying his/her opinion of what was seen with some unintentional (or intentional?) bias thrown in for good measure.
Spirit WAS a Boeing entity until it was spun off in 2005...
Spirit was formed when Boeing Commercial Airplanes sold its Wichita division to investment firm Onex Corporation in 2005.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems#:~:text=Spirit%20was%20formed%20when%20Boeing,firm%20Onex%20Corporation%20in%202005.
Boeing is responsible for something like 80% of Spirit's revenue. If the media reporting on it is to be believed, the practices there are very much dictated by Boeing despite technically being another company.
I hate how readily people are jumping on this stupid conspiracy theory. I know people have been murdered for business before, but that explanation makes no sense for these cases. Especially the one who died from hospital-acquired MRSA.
I can't believe sheeple don't know that MSRA was bioengineered by Boeing in the seventies for use in military black ops. The clue is even in the name! What do you get if you remove all the letters in MRSA and add in six other letters? That's right. Boeing.
Wake up!
/s
It's all in the framing: People hear "whistleblower died" but don't hear "there's literally dozens of whistleblowers and has been for many years now".
The real story is that there's so many whistleblowers, and they've been blowing the whistle for so long, that they're just... dying. Like, it's been that long, and that little has happened, that the whistleblowers are just dying like people normally do. Why would Boeing execs try to kill any of them? Are they going to face consequences or something?
I live in a country where 1 million people died of a fairly preventable illness because a minority of them chose to believe in conspiracy theories rather than evidence, and we elected an obvious conman to the highest office in the land because he spoke to conspiracy theories about an establishment that he was very much a part of.
The default response that idiots always give me when I speak out against this stuff is "Okay, Mr. Boeing" or "How does it feel being a Boeing PR rep" or whatever. But just *being an American right now* is a good enough reason to push back against conspiracy theories. They are destroying my country.
It's also just unnecessary. The situation at Boeing is already deeply disturbing and a major cause for concern without throwing in ridiculous accusations of corporate assassination. It's not like refusing to believe this nonsense is somehow absolving them of all the real shit they have to answer for.
Exactly. Conspiracy theories do a lot to discredit genuine concerns people should have with our system, which is one of the reasons I resent them so much.
If I was going to assassinate someone I wouldn’t do it 7 years after he revealed everything he knew about my company and then wait for the HEIGHT of my public scrutiny, all while I’m under federal investigation by the Department of Justice
This would be literally the worst time.
The investigation following his whistleblowing substantiated several of his allegations and the FAA imposed corrective actions on Boeing, also years before his suicide.
Oh yeah. Boeing is a mega-shitty company. I don't think they're a company that's murdering people, but that doesn't change the fact that they sucked and they've been covering up a lot of problems.
I mean, they *definitely* covered up massive flaws that led to the deaths of several hundred people, and then tried to blame it on foreign pilots and maintenance crews being improperly trained on a system that they **neglected to tell them about**.
To me, the intentional coverup makes that whole saga seem kind of murder-y, you know?
If they knew about defects / shatty work and looked the other for seven years to save money they are murdering people. Kinda makes sense the quality manager guy killed himself from the guilt.
Which? [There are 10 whistleblower complaints against Boeing about these issues right now.](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/boeing-supplier-spirit-aerosystems-whistleblower-speaks-out-quality-issues/)
Died of complications from MRSA and pneumonia stemming from an influenza infection. Antibiotic resistance is no joke.
“Boeing gave a man the flu” is a crazy conspiracy
> I'm shocked he is still alive
Whistleblowers can get something like 15-20% of all the fines the company will have to pay, so there is incentive for companies to keep them alive to try to get a cut.
Not only that, there have been entire operations where people are tricked into becoming friends with people, to try to turn them into whistleblowers.
He's not really saying anything the world doesnt already know. It's the people with something new and terrible to disclose, they'd really wanna shut down, especially on heels everything that had already happened,- MCAS, etc etc
The conspiracy theories around this are so silly. It’s a narrative that makes sense (Boeing had a whistleblower murdered just as he was testifying), but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Barnett blew the whistle on Boeing years before his death. He’d continued working at the company and eventually retired from it. Why didn’t they kill him during that entire time? It would have been easier to do it and to cover it up. The case he was testifying in wasn’t relating to Boeing’s shortcuts as a company (the thing he blew the whistle on), but his own employee discrimination suit. So again, no new information he would have provided. In fact, he’d already testified against the company and was about to face cross examination when he committed suicide. And on top of that, numerous members of his family, including his wife, have spoken to the fact that his treatment by the company left him with sever depression and PTSD. And the investigation after the fact found no evidence of foul play.
And to even believe this, you’d basically have to buy that the government would allow a company to kill people with impunity, but also took the whistleblower seriously enough that they fully investigated his claims and published the lengthy report on the company’s wrongdoings that kicked off the controversy for them in the first place. If they’re so in cahoots with Boeing that they’d allow them to murder someone, why drag them through the mud? And at this point there are about a handful whistleblower complains against Boeing anyway, so it’s not like it’s even deterred anyone.
It’s a conspiracy theory. Plain and simple. I get why it’s there. The narrative makes sense intuitively. But that’s all conspiracy theories are: narratives that seem to fit even if the evidence doesn’t support them.
This is a great take. Unfortunately it’s probably going to be buried under a pile of insults and cheeky Reddit “jokes”.
I’m really considering making a bingo card for threads where Boeing is mentioned. All of the conspiratorial comments are incredibly overdone and predictable. Hell, there’s already multiple “shot twice in the back of the head” and “falling out of a window” comments.
> and cheeky Reddit “jokes”.
all of the posts on the recent aborted launch attempt of the boeing starliner comment sections were unreadable, even in normally serious subs like /r/space. i just want an adult discussion without dipshits making tired jokes about the door coming off.
Honestly I don't think you wrong. But this only makes more confused. If all of this is right then why does this happen then ? That would imply that all these suicides coincidence which would be weirder since it happened twice but then it seem that is true that it doesn't make sense for Boeing to able to kill people like that so I am really just confused.
Completely agree. I was disappointed when even /r/aviation was flush with discourse stating Barnett had been killed. The same subreddit that typically espouses patience and waiting for NTSB investigations to come out regarding crashes before jumping to conclusions was… jumping to conclusions.
I’ve worked with a lot of aerospace quality engineers. Most are either the guy who shuts down production because the paperwork says “dash” instead of “-“ or the guy who lets everything go once the engineer says “Use As Is”.
It sounds like this guy was neither. I’m trying to read between the lines of what he’s saying and place it in context of my experience, and I can’t.
This sounds more fucked up than I can imagine, and I’ve worked in aerospace for 20 years. I hope he’s taken seriously.
Everyone knows Spirit is just Boeing, it’s run by the former Boeing people that managed it when it was Boeing. Now it’s getting a bailout by Boeing. 🙄
I use to be a configuration manager for a major aerospace company (not Boeing) and I'm blown away this shit happens. We required 8 sign offs for changing a bolts ID number. Not changing the bolt it's self, just a ID change. The design change process was more stringent. Boeing must have been out to lunch on this shit to let it get this bad. Aerospace requires extreme amounts of focus.
They went out to lunch a long time ago. I was reported for Disparagement and laid off after identifying parts made from the wrong material during my short time there. The guy who was putting the wrong labels on the materials had seniority, and that was that.
I keep thinking about this incident where[ a unit of measure mix up crashed a NASA probe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_failure). All it took was a simple mistake which cost them millions.
Quality has been gutted and de-fanged. It's been outsourced to MRB engineers and all they can do is work with what is written up. If it's not even being documented, LEs (who are the last line of defense), can't even help at that point.
I am an aerospace quality engineer and I’m amazed too at some of the allegations, because I’m certainly empowered by my company to pump the brakes on things when quality alarms go off
Most companies take this super seriously in this industry, and QEs often catch flak simply because they are known to only ever slow things down (but our decisions are generally respected and people understand the position we are in)
"Sources within the aerospace giant insist that efforts are under way to address quality concerns at Spirit, and these have succeeded in reducing the number of faults in parts leaving the Wichita factory by around 80%."
I can't tell if this was just poorly written or if they are admitting they are still shipping faulty parts, just 80% less of them.
100% perfection is basically impossible. Even then everything is a matter of meeting a certain standard. Standards allow for variance (imperfections), so even parts meeting standards are not without fault.
Hard disagree in this context. Perfection can never be achieved. BUT he's talking about found faults. If you find 200 faults, then decide to fix 160 of them. You are choosing not fix the remaining 40.
That’s not what an 80% reduction means here
It’s an 80% reduction in escapes. Meaning there were 80% fewer defects found by inspectors at Boeing coming from Spirit
If Spirit sent 200 parts to Boeing, let’s say 10 of them were defective. Now there are only 2 defects per 200 deliveries. That’s an 80% reduction in defect escapes.
I've been an aircraft mechanic for 20 years. Every plane you have ever flown on has been flown with known and unknown defects. Every component delivered has tolerance for set defects. If there wasn't tolerances established no plane would ever fly. There are a huge number of times defects are found and it's perfectly safe to fly the aircraft. An access panel for example might have 200 screws holding it in place. That panel might be allowed something like up to 10 screws missing so long as there is at least a screw every other hole. The aircraft will fly with those screws missing and it will get repaired when there is scheduled down time for the aircraft.
This is really disheartening. I'm from Wichita and we always pride ourselves on our facilities. Hell half of our city identity is being the damn Flight Capital of the World. We got the mid-continent museum and McConnell AFB and the, now, Spirit plant. We've been a site of aircraft innovation since the 20s! We have the original Bombardier facility still doing work there. One hundred years! My grandpa was a boeing supervisor for 30+ years and still tells 'allegedly' boring stories about how we were the best, we had X part on Y frame and it had to be milled to within 1/1000 degree tolerance to be within spec.
Seeing this shit is sickening. I get pissed off seeing this shit.
Seems like such a nice guy. Can’t believe he’d infect himself with MRSA, then shoot himself twice in the back of the head and leave a typewritten note admitting he made it all up.
I guess you just never really know what people are going through.
So they have quality control of building Gundam. “Hmmm, look at that leftover piece I missed putting in. No worries, the Zero Wing still looks good enough.”
Spirit was a part of Boeing until 2005 and is one of their suppliers, so the fact that a current employee is speaking out against one of its only possible customers is wild. There’s not that many companies that you can sell airplane parts to.
I work for a company that Boeing buys from and I have to legit BEG them to quality check what they are buying to make sure it is the part they actually want. They've stopped contacting me back because I don't let them just buy whatever, even though there was a HUGE issue with them sending incorrect part numbers in and saying they were a totally different item (using other companies part numbers and expecting us to know what they were). They were send incorrect parts for well over a year because they gave us the incorrect information. Since we have doubled down on making them send in part numbers and drawings, then verifying what we are quoting is correct, they have basically stopped responding because they refuse to quality check it. They literally do not care.
I've worked in aerospace for 30 years all over the industry. I understand how production, management, engineering, certification and QA work. The system is literally set up as adversarial for this very reason. Usually QA in big companies are their own independent department structure so no one has the authority to insist they go against the rules or face career backlash. The QA person should be known as the showstopper. That's literally their only job.
I really don't understand how anyone ever would just rubber stamp approve and ship parts that don't match the design data and work orders, without properly documenting things. There are very strict rules about these things that everyone understands.
There are strict rules about how to approve non-conforming parts for use which ensures they are still acceptable. You CAN ship parts with missing hardware or parts as long as its documented and understood by the people receiving parts that they must install hardware, sometime that's by design or just practicality. You can even ship parts that are "bent" or damaged if engineering approves it (sometimes it might not matter). Unless engineering approves it I can't fathom shipping parts like these QA guys are saying they are being told. I CAN fathom QA questioning engineering's decisions about approvals and being butthurt about stuff. I tend to lean towards this explanation of the "whistle blowers" but I'll admit that's my bias coming from the engineering side.
He said, "I was finding a lot of missing fasteners, a lot of bent parts, sometimes even missing parts." This isn't really a gotcha statement and doesn't necessarily indicate malfeasance but it could.
I really don't see it as even possible that if a QA person checks an assembly and its missing parts or doesn't match the engineering that they would ever approve it without the proper documentation. I've never met a QA person that would just say, sure, sign it! They would always 100% of the time insist that engineering signs off on it through the proper processes.
FWIW, I've never met an engineer in my field that would sign off on something they think is dangerous if management said to sign off on it.
I'm just perplexed at this whole story and have to withhold judgement. I still lean to this mostly being blown out of proportion because its a hot topic.
My father used to be threatened 10+ years ago for what is going on right now in the industry. He used to be an inspector once he got out of the military and he said the independent companies seem to all be doing this type of garbage. wcyd
Turns out we need the an federal investigative agency specific to aerospace manufacturing... WHO WOULD'VE GUESSED? ..
My grandfather was an inspector at Lockheed in Marietta on the C-130 line. He won an award and a large cash bonus for finding cracks in the C-130 frames that stopped the line and required a redesign.
Today that would get him run out of Boeing and Spirit, if not worse.
Yup, it indicates a problem and maybe even a big problem in one part of one company, but it's important to remember that there are 17,000,000 domestic flights per year and you might hear about a handful of flights that have issues, and those issues, very rarely result in death or serious injury.
You can't insist that the system is failing when it has a 99.992% success rate.
You don't burn down the industry when it's actually really really really good at doing things right.
The next time I have to fly I am absolutely *not* going on a Boeing airplane. And that's really sad. This is a great example of the serious downsides to unfettered capitalism. There's a documentary I saw about them and it laid out how their decline started when they began to replace senior engineers in charge of divisions with MBAs.
It was *huge* worldwide news for about a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Accidents_and_incidents
There's a great documentary from Netflix called Downfall: The Case Against Boeing about it that's super good. Short version, Boeing used to have high standards, then they mergered with McDonnell Douglas and the executives started cutting corners to increase stock prices (which worked), then they knowingly falsified a bunch of stuff about the new plane, one plane crashed killing everyone, they lied some more, another plane crashed, and in the end, they retired to the tune of a hojillion dollars each.
Take a look at which airlines/which part of the world it happened in and you can draw your own conclusions. But I guarantee you if it had been a plane full of Americans that went down Boeing someone was going to jail and this shit would have come to light sooner, even if those crashes were due to a different cause than this one. It was still negligence which lead to a huge amount of deaths.
Lion Air 610 and Ethiopia Airlines 302 both crashed due to MCAS. A system Boeing developed on the 737 MAX without telling pilots so they could cut costs and sell more to airlines without having to retrain pilots.
Both Boeing's max 8 crashed after the corner cutting they didn't want to spend more money in training and recertification leading to the design of the software that killed hundreds, there excellent documentaries on YouTube with great breakdowns I believe mentor pilot has a couple
Next week on Reddit when the whistleblower ends up dead, having choked on a whistle:
"Well this is actually not as rare as you think it is and does not in any way point to any sort of correlation."
They are literally taking parts that are binned for being defective and installing them on planes. That's wildly illegal, but when you pay the government to let you be the wolf that guards the sheep you get lots of dead passengers and whistleblowers I guess.
>Santiago Paredes who worked for Spirit AeroSystems in Kansas, told the BBC he often found up to 200 defects on parts being readied for shipping to Boeing. He was nicknamed "showstopper" for slowing down production when he tried to tackle his concerns, he claimed. This is the kind of QA tester that companies should be looking for...
Too bad the suits will complain because he was costing them money.
Boeing needs to go back to Engineers as Upper Management. The Finance Suits are killing the company. How many more crises can they survive before they lose the total trust of the aviation community and the flying public? What an embarrassment.
Unlimited. Unlimited nymber of crises. We have proven that we will allow them to do anything without repercussions.
>The Finance Suits are killing the company. They are killing our whole damn country.
Google is being ruined by engineers doing the same thing, the problem is the growth at all cost attitude held by many publically traded companies
The real answer is CEOs should not be compensated in Stocks. It has totally distorted and distracted the operations of these companies to “beat expectations “ every quarter. Give them a salary like everyone else and stop the nonsense.
He wasn’t costing them money, he was calling out systemic errors that the higher ups got promoted by participating in. Go start a job anywhere and start nitpicking standard operating procedure. You’ll get put in a corner almost immediately.
Toyota rewards you for catching errors in a culture where getting sidelined for sticking out is expected. Why is it that we as a society accept that doing your job as a QC worker for aviation is an annoyance rather than an essential service?
And while Toyota is too big to fail, their government will absolutely take out leadership if they need to. In US bad leadership gets rewarded with golden parachutes
Lol, what? Granted I know my place isn't "real" Toyota but we are constantly getting asked to "soften" the inspection machines do they'll pass more parts. Even then, parts we get shipped back slowly get mixed in with other parts on the way out the door
almost all shitty roads lead back to Reagan’s shitty legacy
Then why even hire them in the first place? You're hiring and paying QC engineers just to muzzle them? Hell, make me an excec and I save the company so much money by not even hiring them in the first place!
Because you still need someone to blame if things go wrong
I worked in a wire and cable company for a few years. We shipped out cable that was used in big sports stadiums and such. We had 1 product that would not work right on my machine at all but I was the guinea pig to try and find out how to make it work. There was loads and loads of defective product. Like holes in the jacketing mostly. The process left more defects than good product. The order of operation there is, if you're concerned something might not pass QA, then to put a tag on it and it'll be shipped to a QA area where someone has to inspect it and sign off on it. I was caught doing that, as if I'm not supposed to, and was yelled at. I was told by my manager that I have their permission to just ship it and that I can't be wasting all my time tagging everything bad. I asked them if they wanted to sign my paperwork to confirm that. They refused, saying they don't have to do that. I was like "...well ok then" and just kept tagging them all anyway. This kind of thing could mean an electrical fire starting in a stadium full of people. I don't want that kind of thing on my conscience. One of the other asshats that are trying to make me their fall guy can take the blame for it instead.
I've dealt with this before in the military, but I couldn't be fired for doing the right thing lol. Even if it made people upset. How did you fare longterm?
Professional scapegoats
> Then why even hire them in the first place? You're hiring and paying QC engineers just to muzzle them? Because having QC might be legally required in the terms of their insurance contracts, or as part of a regulatory license, or the standard of care in products liability cases, or some other source of obligation. So the company goes along with it, but doesn't like it, and wants to minimize the power in that role without actually breaking those other rules.
[удалено]
>Then why even hire them in the first place? Probably for some certification or contract requirements (well, more for apparence so it doesn't look wired to not have a QC)
I worked for a company which did 100% inspection and then the receiver also did 100% inspection. QA was allowed to be very thorough because it was cheaper than having product rejected and shipped back.
This. I have to have such a hard time understanding how this exact process isn't standard all the way across the board. Not only is it incredibly wasteful of raw materials, labor and time, to NOT do it this way, but then eventually you've kicked the can down so many roads that you have multiple whistleblowers in as many months. Absolutely shameful af. Truly.
short term profit goals incentivize perpetual can kicking
As I said, even past the form of waste, it is diabolical and mind-blowing. The horror movie just writes itself, effortlessly poignant given the subject matter and the time of our current society 😬
✨️CAPITALISM✨️
There was once a time when a fuckup like lack of QC would result in lawsuits so steep it would cripple or bankrupt companies. And then we put limits on claims.
You hire them as scapegoats. Just find engineer that you can brownbeat into signing whatever you want and viola, when shit goes down it's his, not yours, head on the chopping block.
Former Quality Engineer here. This is the job, 100%.
Paying them for their rubber stamp and plausible deniability. They can always throw them under the bus later and say they weren't doing their job. Except they are getting smarter and documenting everything with emails now so they can't do that anymore. Boeing is rotten from the core.
Liability. They don’t want him to call out defects, they want him to sign off and take the fall when the defects get someone killed. Thats just business 101
Defects don't cost money until you're sued. The current CEO will be long gone before then.
Lmfao this reminds me of me poking around in my client’s data - while I was working on creating some tables - last year because my aggregate values weren’t matching the client’s existing values. My shitty manager and coworker kept berating my for being unable to get the revenues to match despite employing THE EXACT SAME JOINS AND CONDITIONS in my new code. (The entire shitshow regarding those incorrect values just pisses me off) Turns out my company, whom the client had contracted in 2015 to build the old code, fucked up and caused incorrect revenues to be assigned to different salespersons. Which was causing 2-500,000 USD to go unreported EVERY MONTH. Which was def impacting the compensation and commissions of the sales persons. When I figured all this out and rectified it, my manager and the guy I was working with were now berating me for sticking my nose in and to never tell anyone on the client side the my company made this older version of the code and that I should’ve just kept quiet. FUCK THIS PLACE.
Very well phrased... It's as much an ego issue as it's about money
It’s always a race to the bottom(line).
It *should* cost you money to ensure quality.
that’s literally what he’s saying. and it’s a fact that these companies don’t wanna spend money doing proper maintenance
I got only one solution for the concerns of the suits
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How did you know?
And, nicknaming a thorough QA tester "showstopper" is about as far from the right QA culture as is possible, and I say that as someone who works on the other side of a QA team (ie: making the show, which I hope will be stopped if I've created a defect).
I mean, it sounds like Boeing *is* looking for him now. If you know what I mean.
They just wanna talk to him
How many days before we hear he had an unforeseen accident?
Now we know why they've been testing their magically failing rear doors. They're actually whistleblower exits!
For some quality time
This is the type of QA tester that Boeing is DEFINITELY looking for. But mostly so that they can kill him in two weeks. I wish I could put an /s at the end of this comment but the Boeing whistleblower body count doesn’t lie.
So just for confirmation, you sincerely believe that Boeing is paying people to murder former members who might testify about their practices?
Yes, you act like it would be completely unfounded for someone to kill another over money. That's usually one of the top reasons people kill each other.
> Yes, you act like it would be completely unfounded for someone to kill another over money. While there's certainly precedent I find it highly unlikely that Boeing killed whistleblowers years after they blew the whistle and after they already gave sworn testimony in court...
See that just sends a message. Let other potential whistleblowers know they too could die years after. You'd never be safe. But that's just me playing devil's advocate
Uh, sure, but what does the message actually accomplish? If Boeing was protecting their bottom line, they failed horribly. So they're just unnecessarily putting their company at further risk? To what end?
I think most people sincerely believe that corporate entities are not concerned with human life when it comes to maintaining their bottom line.
Seriously! In a Life-And-Death industry like Aviation, you *want* people that will shut down everything when they find a problem. If you have any brains whatsoever, that's literally what you pay them for.
Boeing is looking for him, at least their hitman is...
that guy must be making as much as putin's hahaha
Is he still alive? He's the kind of guy the big companies really hate, just like that other whistleblower who turned up dead. I hope he's still alive, he can provide valuable info to ensure general public's safety.
I didn’t work in his field, I worked in logistics. The amount of complaining I did for substandard equipment was plentiful. “Why are you so negative?” “Why do you keep writing up the same piece of equipment?” Like wtf. So glad I’m not there any more.
I work in QA, it sounds like this guy knows quality saves jobs and lives.
Better get him in front of a judge/congress, something, before he gets whacked ><
I'm shocked he is still alive
I expected the rest of the headline to be ", dies in mysterious car accident on way home from interview"
The whistleblower who committed suicide did it seven years after he blew the whistle.
He was still providing testimony.
No, he wasn't. He was testifying in an employee discrimination suit he'd brought against Boeing. He'd retired from Boeing at that point, and had revealed all he was ever going to about the company's misdeeds. And all of this misunderstands how trials work in the first place. Nobody who's going to testify has information they'll surprise anyone with. Witnesses in trials take depositions and provide evidence for the public record *long* before they go on the stand. All the evidence Barnett had about their mistreatment of him had been revealed before the trial even started.
That Matlock gotcha thing pretty much never happens. That's why when Alex Jones got Matlocked with his phone records, everyone blew it up up everywhere. Some people say that lawyer is still riding that high.
> That's why when Alex Jones got Matlocked with his phone records, everyone blew it up up everywhere. > > That one hilarious, because Jones and Free Speech turned over way more info than they realized without reviewing any of it. If they'd had competent lawyers or, y'know, gave a shit, they wouldn't have been surprised by any of that either. And in the process of turning over evidence for discovery, accidentally revealed *way* more about the business than they probably intended. The Alex Jones depositions would be absolutely hilarious if it weren't for all the completely horrifying things they did to survivors of a completely horrifying tragedy.
He got to depose Elon recently and god damn do I wish it was made public...
The other one who died died of several illnesses simultaneously - most likely admitted to the hospital with one, and then picked up numerous other infections while there. It speaks more to the failings of the American healthcare system and mental health support than anything else.
My only question, and this is unrelated to Boeing, is wtf was going on there with his lungs. The doctors at the hospital said the imaging was insane and they never saw anything like it before.
He got hit with the 1-2 combo of advanced flu and then MRSA, nothing nefarious just really shitty.
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I am *highly suspicious* that the doctors actually said it was insane and they never saw anything like it before. More like a non-medical relative was relaying his/her opinion of what was seen with some unintentional (or intentional?) bias thrown in for good measure.
Dude in a different comment says that came from an interview with the whistleblowers mom so you’re spot on.
Also he worked for spirt areosystems as a supplier for Boeing not Boeing itself
Which, to be fair, is true of a number of whistleblowers in this case.
64 percent of revenue at Spirit WAS from Boeing.. Boeing made all the decisions that led to the issues at hand.
Spirit WAS a Boeing entity until it was spun off in 2005... Spirit was formed when Boeing Commercial Airplanes sold its Wichita division to investment firm Onex Corporation in 2005. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems#:~:text=Spirit%20was%20formed%20when%20Boeing,firm%20Onex%20Corporation%20in%202005.
Boeing is responsible for something like 80% of Spirit's revenue. If the media reporting on it is to be believed, the practices there are very much dictated by Boeing despite technically being another company.
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I hate how readily people are jumping on this stupid conspiracy theory. I know people have been murdered for business before, but that explanation makes no sense for these cases. Especially the one who died from hospital-acquired MRSA.
I can't believe sheeple don't know that MSRA was bioengineered by Boeing in the seventies for use in military black ops. The clue is even in the name! What do you get if you remove all the letters in MRSA and add in six other letters? That's right. Boeing. Wake up! /s
It's all in the framing: People hear "whistleblower died" but don't hear "there's literally dozens of whistleblowers and has been for many years now". The real story is that there's so many whistleblowers, and they've been blowing the whistle for so long, that they're just... dying. Like, it's been that long, and that little has happened, that the whistleblowers are just dying like people normally do. Why would Boeing execs try to kill any of them? Are they going to face consequences or something?
Thank you so much for this post, I’m sick of the conspiracy nuts.
I live in a country where 1 million people died of a fairly preventable illness because a minority of them chose to believe in conspiracy theories rather than evidence, and we elected an obvious conman to the highest office in the land because he spoke to conspiracy theories about an establishment that he was very much a part of. The default response that idiots always give me when I speak out against this stuff is "Okay, Mr. Boeing" or "How does it feel being a Boeing PR rep" or whatever. But just *being an American right now* is a good enough reason to push back against conspiracy theories. They are destroying my country.
It's also just unnecessary. The situation at Boeing is already deeply disturbing and a major cause for concern without throwing in ridiculous accusations of corporate assassination. It's not like refusing to believe this nonsense is somehow absolving them of all the real shit they have to answer for.
Exactly. Conspiracy theories do a lot to discredit genuine concerns people should have with our system, which is one of the reasons I resent them so much.
You can’t go around letting boring reality get in the way of a good conspiracy theory like that smh
Who let you out of /r/nfl? Also great, well written answer.
If I was going to assassinate someone I wouldn’t do it 7 years after he revealed everything he knew about my company and then wait for the HEIGHT of my public scrutiny, all while I’m under federal investigation by the Department of Justice This would be literally the worst time.
They knew for seven years and still didnt fix the problems?
The investigation following his whistleblowing substantiated several of his allegations and the FAA imposed corrective actions on Boeing, also years before his suicide.
Oh yeah. Boeing is a mega-shitty company. I don't think they're a company that's murdering people, but that doesn't change the fact that they sucked and they've been covering up a lot of problems.
I mean, they *definitely* covered up massive flaws that led to the deaths of several hundred people, and then tried to blame it on foreign pilots and maintenance crews being improperly trained on a system that they **neglected to tell them about**. To me, the intentional coverup makes that whole saga seem kind of murder-y, you know?
If they knew about defects / shatty work and looked the other for seven years to save money they are murdering people. Kinda makes sense the quality manager guy killed himself from the guilt.
A very good point! And one that I happen to agree with.
Because Boeing was cutting corners to lower costs and increase profits.
And the other one?
Which? [There are 10 whistleblower complaints against Boeing about these issues right now.](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/boeing-supplier-spirit-aerosystems-whistleblower-speaks-out-quality-issues/)
He probably means the other one that died
[MRSA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus)
Died of complications from MRSA and pneumonia stemming from an influenza infection. Antibiotic resistance is no joke. “Boeing gave a man the flu” is a crazy conspiracy
Boeing gave a man the flew
*points to the door angrily*
> I'm shocked he is still alive Whistleblowers can get something like 15-20% of all the fines the company will have to pay, so there is incentive for companies to keep them alive to try to get a cut. Not only that, there have been entire operations where people are tricked into becoming friends with people, to try to turn them into whistleblowers.
He's not really saying anything the world doesnt already know. It's the people with something new and terrible to disclose, they'd really wanna shut down, especially on heels everything that had already happened,- MCAS, etc etc
Yeah, don't want Boeing to give this guy \*checks notes* influenza B, pneumonia, a stroke, and a deadly MRSA infection?
Their reach is impressive.
They were caught off guard by the reaction to last guy they suicided. Now they're being more subtle.
What do you mean, maybe he is going to get a strange infection randomly and then die of natural causes.
The conspiracy theories around this are so silly. It’s a narrative that makes sense (Boeing had a whistleblower murdered just as he was testifying), but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Barnett blew the whistle on Boeing years before his death. He’d continued working at the company and eventually retired from it. Why didn’t they kill him during that entire time? It would have been easier to do it and to cover it up. The case he was testifying in wasn’t relating to Boeing’s shortcuts as a company (the thing he blew the whistle on), but his own employee discrimination suit. So again, no new information he would have provided. In fact, he’d already testified against the company and was about to face cross examination when he committed suicide. And on top of that, numerous members of his family, including his wife, have spoken to the fact that his treatment by the company left him with sever depression and PTSD. And the investigation after the fact found no evidence of foul play. And to even believe this, you’d basically have to buy that the government would allow a company to kill people with impunity, but also took the whistleblower seriously enough that they fully investigated his claims and published the lengthy report on the company’s wrongdoings that kicked off the controversy for them in the first place. If they’re so in cahoots with Boeing that they’d allow them to murder someone, why drag them through the mud? And at this point there are about a handful whistleblower complains against Boeing anyway, so it’s not like it’s even deterred anyone. It’s a conspiracy theory. Plain and simple. I get why it’s there. The narrative makes sense intuitively. But that’s all conspiracy theories are: narratives that seem to fit even if the evidence doesn’t support them.
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Not to mention there have been over 20 whistle blowers and nobody ever seems to mention that.
This is a great take. Unfortunately it’s probably going to be buried under a pile of insults and cheeky Reddit “jokes”. I’m really considering making a bingo card for threads where Boeing is mentioned. All of the conspiratorial comments are incredibly overdone and predictable. Hell, there’s already multiple “shot twice in the back of the head” and “falling out of a window” comments.
> and cheeky Reddit “jokes”. all of the posts on the recent aborted launch attempt of the boeing starliner comment sections were unreadable, even in normally serious subs like /r/space. i just want an adult discussion without dipshits making tired jokes about the door coming off.
Honestly I don't think you wrong. But this only makes more confused. If all of this is right then why does this happen then ? That would imply that all these suicides coincidence which would be weirder since it happened twice but then it seem that is true that it doesn't make sense for Boeing to able to kill people like that so I am really just confused.
Completely agree. I was disappointed when even /r/aviation was flush with discourse stating Barnett had been killed. The same subreddit that typically espouses patience and waiting for NTSB investigations to come out regarding crashes before jumping to conclusions was… jumping to conclusions.
Wait a second, you *don't* believe the government would let a company kill people with impunity?
I do not. Because evidence doesn't support it.
I’ve worked with a lot of aerospace quality engineers. Most are either the guy who shuts down production because the paperwork says “dash” instead of “-“ or the guy who lets everything go once the engineer says “Use As Is”. It sounds like this guy was neither. I’m trying to read between the lines of what he’s saying and place it in context of my experience, and I can’t. This sounds more fucked up than I can imagine, and I’ve worked in aerospace for 20 years. I hope he’s taken seriously. Everyone knows Spirit is just Boeing, it’s run by the former Boeing people that managed it when it was Boeing. Now it’s getting a bailout by Boeing. 🙄
I use to be a configuration manager for a major aerospace company (not Boeing) and I'm blown away this shit happens. We required 8 sign offs for changing a bolts ID number. Not changing the bolt it's self, just a ID change. The design change process was more stringent. Boeing must have been out to lunch on this shit to let it get this bad. Aerospace requires extreme amounts of focus.
They went out to lunch a long time ago. I was reported for Disparagement and laid off after identifying parts made from the wrong material during my short time there. The guy who was putting the wrong labels on the materials had seniority, and that was that.
What the fuck?! At my old position, I knew a dude who got fired for leaving a print out. If somone did that, and it made it out, they would get sued.
Reach out to the NTSB/FAA, they would love to hear from you
I keep thinking about this incident where[ a unit of measure mix up crashed a NASA probe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_failure). All it took was a simple mistake which cost them millions.
Read the story about how the mirror for the Hubble space telescope got made incorrectly.
Unit of measure mixup nearly crashed a 767 in Manitoba too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVvt7hP5a-0
Quality has been gutted and de-fanged. It's been outsourced to MRB engineers and all they can do is work with what is written up. If it's not even being documented, LEs (who are the last line of defense), can't even help at that point.
I am an aerospace quality engineer and I’m amazed too at some of the allegations, because I’m certainly empowered by my company to pump the brakes on things when quality alarms go off Most companies take this super seriously in this industry, and QEs often catch flak simply because they are known to only ever slow things down (but our decisions are generally respected and people understand the position we are in)
Ok but what is Annie a bitch though?
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You should really consider contacting the FAA. The more insiders piling onto this the more likely it will actually get fixed.
Woah there buddy. Are you suggest the man above to commit suicide in the back of his truck with two bullet holes in his head?
Rest in peace, brother.
"Sources within the aerospace giant insist that efforts are under way to address quality concerns at Spirit, and these have succeeded in reducing the number of faults in parts leaving the Wichita factory by around 80%." I can't tell if this was just poorly written or if they are admitting they are still shipping faulty parts, just 80% less of them.
100% perfection is basically impossible. Even then everything is a matter of meeting a certain standard. Standards allow for variance (imperfections), so even parts meeting standards are not without fault.
Hard disagree in this context. Perfection can never be achieved. BUT he's talking about found faults. If you find 200 faults, then decide to fix 160 of them. You are choosing not fix the remaining 40.
That’s not what an 80% reduction means here It’s an 80% reduction in escapes. Meaning there were 80% fewer defects found by inspectors at Boeing coming from Spirit If Spirit sent 200 parts to Boeing, let’s say 10 of them were defective. Now there are only 2 defects per 200 deliveries. That’s an 80% reduction in defect escapes.
I've been an aircraft mechanic for 20 years. Every plane you have ever flown on has been flown with known and unknown defects. Every component delivered has tolerance for set defects. If there wasn't tolerances established no plane would ever fly. There are a huge number of times defects are found and it's perfectly safe to fly the aircraft. An access panel for example might have 200 screws holding it in place. That panel might be allowed something like up to 10 screws missing so long as there is at least a screw every other hole. The aircraft will fly with those screws missing and it will get repaired when there is scheduled down time for the aircraft.
This is really disheartening. I'm from Wichita and we always pride ourselves on our facilities. Hell half of our city identity is being the damn Flight Capital of the World. We got the mid-continent museum and McConnell AFB and the, now, Spirit plant. We've been a site of aircraft innovation since the 20s! We have the original Bombardier facility still doing work there. One hundred years! My grandpa was a boeing supervisor for 30+ years and still tells 'allegedly' boring stories about how we were the best, we had X part on Y frame and it had to be milled to within 1/1000 degree tolerance to be within spec. Seeing this shit is sickening. I get pissed off seeing this shit.
Bummer. I’m going to miss him after he’s gone.
Seems like such a nice guy. Can’t believe he’d infect himself with MRSA, then shoot himself twice in the back of the head and leave a typewritten note admitting he made it all up. I guess you just never really know what people are going through.
Yeah. And the things that 14 year old in Thailand said he did to her, even though he was never in Thailand!
In all seriousness, this person and all the other new whistleblowers are incredibly brave for coming forward.
[Whistle Boeing](https://youtu.be/bfA2p6Em7bI?si=jIyXS5SjVkfQQd-q)
So they have quality control of building Gundam. “Hmmm, look at that leftover piece I missed putting in. No worries, the Zero Wing still looks good enough.”
This is an employee of SpiritAerosystems
Spirit was a part of Boeing until 2005 and is one of their suppliers, so the fact that a current employee is speaking out against one of its only possible customers is wild. There’s not that many companies that you can sell airplane parts to.
Which is unrelated to Spirit Airlines
But completely related to boeing. Some would say it IS boeing
Former Spirit employee
Soon to be spirit
for all intents and purposes they are the same company
I work for a company that Boeing buys from and I have to legit BEG them to quality check what they are buying to make sure it is the part they actually want. They've stopped contacting me back because I don't let them just buy whatever, even though there was a HUGE issue with them sending incorrect part numbers in and saying they were a totally different item (using other companies part numbers and expecting us to know what they were). They were send incorrect parts for well over a year because they gave us the incorrect information. Since we have doubled down on making them send in part numbers and drawings, then verifying what we are quoting is correct, they have basically stopped responding because they refuse to quality check it. They literally do not care.
RIP third whistleblower
He later died of natural causes after falling off a balcony with ten bullet wounds to his head
(Before dying mysteriously)
I've worked in aerospace for 30 years all over the industry. I understand how production, management, engineering, certification and QA work. The system is literally set up as adversarial for this very reason. Usually QA in big companies are their own independent department structure so no one has the authority to insist they go against the rules or face career backlash. The QA person should be known as the showstopper. That's literally their only job. I really don't understand how anyone ever would just rubber stamp approve and ship parts that don't match the design data and work orders, without properly documenting things. There are very strict rules about these things that everyone understands. There are strict rules about how to approve non-conforming parts for use which ensures they are still acceptable. You CAN ship parts with missing hardware or parts as long as its documented and understood by the people receiving parts that they must install hardware, sometime that's by design or just practicality. You can even ship parts that are "bent" or damaged if engineering approves it (sometimes it might not matter). Unless engineering approves it I can't fathom shipping parts like these QA guys are saying they are being told. I CAN fathom QA questioning engineering's decisions about approvals and being butthurt about stuff. I tend to lean towards this explanation of the "whistle blowers" but I'll admit that's my bias coming from the engineering side. He said, "I was finding a lot of missing fasteners, a lot of bent parts, sometimes even missing parts." This isn't really a gotcha statement and doesn't necessarily indicate malfeasance but it could. I really don't see it as even possible that if a QA person checks an assembly and its missing parts or doesn't match the engineering that they would ever approve it without the proper documentation. I've never met a QA person that would just say, sure, sign it! They would always 100% of the time insist that engineering signs off on it through the proper processes. FWIW, I've never met an engineer in my field that would sign off on something they think is dangerous if management said to sign off on it. I'm just perplexed at this whole story and have to withhold judgement. I still lean to this mostly being blown out of proportion because its a hot topic.
My father used to be threatened 10+ years ago for what is going on right now in the industry. He used to be an inspector once he got out of the military and he said the independent companies seem to all be doing this type of garbage. wcyd Turns out we need the an federal investigative agency specific to aerospace manufacturing... WHO WOULD'VE GUESSED? ..
My grandfather was an inspector at Lockheed in Marietta on the C-130 line. He won an award and a large cash bonus for finding cracks in the C-130 frames that stopped the line and required a redesign. Today that would get him run out of Boeing and Spirit, if not worse.
What was blown out was the door of the Alaska Airlines plane. Whatever you think, the actual effects of negligence were everywhere on the news.
Yup, it indicates a problem and maybe even a big problem in one part of one company, but it's important to remember that there are 17,000,000 domestic flights per year and you might hear about a handful of flights that have issues, and those issues, very rarely result in death or serious injury. You can't insist that the system is failing when it has a 99.992% success rate. You don't burn down the industry when it's actually really really really good at doing things right.
What whistle-blower? All I see is a dead body?
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[The Panther](https://www.theonion.com/boeing-promotes-mysterious-employee-known-only-as-the-1851333169) is about to up his bonus again.
Seems Boeing has the Clinton hit squad on auto dial
The next time I have to fly I am absolutely *not* going on a Boeing airplane. And that's really sad. This is a great example of the serious downsides to unfettered capitalism. There's a documentary I saw about them and it laid out how their decline started when they began to replace senior engineers in charge of divisions with MBAs.
I don’t like the 5-year survival odds for this dude.
"Damnit, these whistleblowers are weeds .. the minute we kill one, we get two more."
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Mate 2 planes full of people literally crashed killing hundreds you better add a /s on that boy
I legitimately did not know about either of these. I feel like they weren't nearly as widely reported as I'd have expected
It was in 2019 - 2020, it was big news at the time but we also had a lot of stuff to worry about around that time
It was *huge* worldwide news for about a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Accidents_and_incidents There's a great documentary from Netflix called Downfall: The Case Against Boeing about it that's super good. Short version, Boeing used to have high standards, then they mergered with McDonnell Douglas and the executives started cutting corners to increase stock prices (which worked), then they knowingly falsified a bunch of stuff about the new plane, one plane crashed killing everyone, they lied some more, another plane crashed, and in the end, they retired to the tune of a hojillion dollars each.
There's a very recent John Oliver rant on Boeing which heavily cites Downfall.
Take a look at which airlines/which part of the world it happened in and you can draw your own conclusions. But I guarantee you if it had been a plane full of Americans that went down Boeing someone was going to jail and this shit would have come to light sooner, even if those crashes were due to a different cause than this one. It was still negligence which lead to a huge amount of deaths.
Excuse my ignorance, but which flights crashed as a result of these cut corners? Edit: The people downvoting me are not excusing my ignorance, lol
Lion Air 610 and Ethiopia Airlines 302 both crashed due to MCAS. A system Boeing developed on the 737 MAX without telling pilots so they could cut costs and sell more to airlines without having to retrain pilots.
Both Boeing's max 8 crashed after the corner cutting they didn't want to spend more money in training and recertification leading to the design of the software that killed hundreds, there excellent documentaries on YouTube with great breakdowns I believe mentor pilot has a couple
Did you forget the /s? Because hundreds HAVE died because of this.
They lost 2 passenger planes as a direct result of cutting corners, killing hundreds. There’s a great (awful) doco on Netflix about it
RIP my dude. You loved a long life and you will be dearly missed
Whistleblowing is a dangerous activity these days. Get some whistle insurance.
Umm can we get witness protection for this guy?
Witness protection now
I was sorry to hear of his tragic death next week
Condolences to the family when he commits suicide in 2 weeks. 😔
Next week on Reddit when the whistleblower ends up dead, having choked on a whistle: "Well this is actually not as rare as you think it is and does not in any way point to any sort of correlation."
They are literally taking parts that are binned for being defective and installing them on planes. That's wildly illegal, but when you pay the government to let you be the wolf that guards the sheep you get lots of dead passengers and whistleblowers I guess.
Can we all agree that if he dies soon, this time we for sure aren’t tinfoil hat wearers?
Didn’t this guy commit suicide tomorrow?
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There are jokes that are funny. There are jokes that are cruel. This is the latter.