You Want to Fix Boeing? Prosecute Its Executives

This is at the core of the issue, but as the author points out, it's extremely unlikely to happen.

>The settlement makes it obvious that the government is afraid of what would happen—not just to Boeing but to the Defense Department and even the larger economy—if it hit the company as hard as the company deserves to be hit.

Boeing is very much too Big™ to (be allowed to) fail, and thus the actual individuals who are responsible for killings hundreds of people will walk away and be replaced by another set of people who will know that they can do the exact same thing with impunity.

That feels like that would apply to half the software I use! Then again, it would describe some of the places at which I've worked. But I'm a software engineer and so I have lots of employment options. What's an aeronautical engineer, an aviation material engineer, or avionics expert supposed to do? They have limited options for employment - and that's why it's important to prosecute the executives.

It's bad for everyone that the DoJ offered a plea deal. I know that's SOP, but Boeing isn't a usual company, and this isn't a usual situation. We need to know what actually happened. Is this truly a failure of management as is being portrayed, or is this a failure of process? Has the complexity of design and manufacturing now exceeded our ability to ensure quality? These are the kinds of questions I would like to have answered and an actual trial would give us a better opportunity to learn the real issues.

There is a way to get around this problem of proving culpability of individuals in large organizations. RICO was a way to go after mafia bosses. Thanks to the revolving door (of politicians, staffers of various committees, DOJ employees, prosecutors), it is impossible for the latter class to use RICO to go after any executive of any large company. Of course, one can say SBF was convicted; here, it was easy to find evidence to prosecute and convict SBF.

It probably wont fix the issue but this kind of non-action is why most people have lost all trust in the American Governments ability to regulate corporations at all.

It's very likely that the current court structure would be extremely reluctant to issue any guilty verdict against a member of the executive class for simply chasing short term profit at the cost of the public good/safety so that this is the best that could be do but if that's true it's basically demonstrating that the technocratic center have lost it's ability to be effective technocrats and that can/will have severe implications for who is considered electable to the point where we might not see another centrist government for a while.

In general, corporations need to be more fragile than people. A corporation can live forever, gathering up resources, eating up the useful work of tens of thousands of people. Corporations can also be born a lot more easily than people.

Making it easy to kill them would actually benefit a lot of people, since the people can be transferred along with their experience to other corporations.

Want to make real culture change at a company like Boeing? You make it easy for Boeing to die, so that the people who have other ideas about how to make planes can do so without a massive incumbent in their way.

Do you remember when the Boeing 787 Dreamliner kept getting delayed? At some point I thought it was never going to get completed. And then they had to compete with Airbus. Competition is what killed Boeing safety culture.

The original sin of the Max disasters was rushing to make the 50+ year-old 737 something it wasn't meant to be to counter Airbus's success in the narrow body segment.

You need to actually prove with evidence actual wrongdoing on their part as a person. Or at a minimum prove that they failed in their fiduciary duties - a frustratingly murky concept.

Innocent until proven guilty, burden of proof etc all still applies.

Some general sense of well you were at the helm and everyone is angry thus you go to jail isn’t going to stick legally.

That’s not to say I’m against it, if they can manage to find suitable evidence they absolutely should. Just saying the article is big on emotion (rightly so) and thin on legal basis.

This is as true now as it was during the financial crisis. The most they will do is toss an engineer following orders under the bus like they did with Volkswagen.