WHY is Boeing Facing CRIMINAL Charges?!

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In March this year, Boeing went through what analysts are calling the biggest single management change in its entire history. This came after a devastating safety audit, that raised even more questions about the company’s safety culture.

But on top of that, now the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI have now gotten involved, adding another chapter to this troubling story – and with it, they add a troubling question: could Boeing, and some of its employees and management, ACTUALLY face criminal charges?

Stay tuned.
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Below you will find the links to videos and sources used in this episode.

[barretblake]

They absolutely should face criminal charges. Too many of these CEOs walk away from these criminal acts with their golden parachutes.

[waldopepper]

"we cant find the door plug documents that would incriminate us". "tragically, the whistleblower witness that fought for 14 years to get this matter to court, has suicided himself on the eve of achieving that". "we made some decisions based on greed that killed over 300 people, but safety is our top priority" . yeah right. lets hope they ARE criminally investigated.

[petedenton]

Interesting. About 15 years ago I did a lot of work with a failing hospital. The hospital has been failing for many years at the time (but has improved significantly since). We found two key cultural problems which had led to worsening performance/safety:

1. Bullying leadership - led to pressure to report good performance. People reported what they thought their managers wanted to hear and this often led to inaccurate data. Leadership believed things were better than they were because they took at data at face value.

2. 'Frozen Gateau Syndrome' - people at the top of the organisation wanted things improve and to know what was going on; people delivering services to patients know what was going on and wanted to improve; but people in the middle seemed more interested in furthering their careers than they were in the truth getting between the two outer layers. Leadership trusted ambitious middle managers more than they should have and failed to put effective processes in place to engage with people working at delivery level.

This all sounds very familiar in the context of the current Boeing situation...

[dhawthorne]

Drop the Better Help sponsorship! Their "therapists" have suggested that self-deletion might be the best option, suggest "just don't be gay" as a solution for abusive parents and because they don't get paid for unscheduled consultations, they regularly ignore or hang up on off-hours emergency calls. Not to mention that the platform, itself, (unlike the "therapists"), is not restricted by confidentiality laws so they can and DO collect, store and sell your information to third parties, costing their customers potential employment, loans and insurance premiums. Better Help is worse than no help at all.

[machdaddy]

What a concept that a CEO be held accountable, rather than being given a bonus for this kind of screw up.

[davidwebb]

Boeing employees too scared to whistleblow, in case they suddenly feel suicidal……

[PghGameFix]

THey don't have build documents ?!?!?! I'm building a plane in my garage, and I can't get an airworthy cert without my build documentation. This is ridiculous.

[jackalovski]

I used to be an engineer working in the automotive manufacturing industry. The factory I worked for made safety critical electrical switches for automotive manufacturers including scania. They had very strict safety standards specifically TS16949 which is an expansion of the ISO standards. Officially the company had a “no blame culture” so that if someone discovered a mistake they could report it without fear of retribution or retaliation so that faults could be caught quickly and not filter to the end user. Unfortunately the management were lazy, childish and penny pinching so they resorted to disciplinary action on team members which resulted in any faults being hidden by the staff. This poor management was a main contributing factor to why I left the company. it is very easy in the current economic environment to threaten staff to keep silent with the threat of unemployment and I have no doubts that this is something Boeing is doing.

[hidden-treasures]

I worked in an aerospace environment where engineering contractors fabricated technical reports for pay. I read some of these totally bogus reports that cost hundreds of thousands. I was pressured to falsify reports as well, but refused. They tried to terminate me, but were unsuccessful. I had won an outside award that made it politically difficult. They say "people couldn't keep a secret that long". Yes they can. Fear is a powerful motivator.

[AvionicsEducation]

As a former Boeing employee and no I am not suicidal. I think it’s criminal what they did to my beloved 737. I just think that people are tired of watching executives making decisions that lead to death not being held accountable. One solution is to stop the golden parachutes given out for failure. I am really hoping that tell the stockholders to take a little less money and let us make Boeing great again.

[MelanieRuck-dquo]

The 'door man' is on leave from 'medical reasons'? Gosh! That's a lucky coincidence!

[Mountain-Man-]

Just to clarify something Peter: The justice department doesn't necessarily need to suspect a person or organisation's intentionally commited a crime. Negligence or willful ignorance can also be prosecuted when it is extreme.

[Argosh]

Considering the "Justice" System in the USA this is only gonna make the situation worse. Small fries who can't afford lawyers will be "held accountable" while the executives who pushed these policies will walk free.
Not only is that unjust, it also means that safety will suffer even more. It flies in the face of reporting culture.

And that's not even talking about the possibility that a Whistle-blower might have been murdered...

[BrianBell]

Slightly irrelevant but I'm a techie.We were asked in 2001 to tender for an NHS project. It was a big project for us. Just shy of a billion quid. The politician in charge had dropped out of uni after 6 months, but had his ideas on how it should be done. He hadn't a clue. We were delivering global projects on time and under budget every week. I looked at his plan and said (sorry I don't normally swear) "This is bullshit. Everything is wrong. It would be easier to run a car on trees."
I got fired, they spent 7 billion more than expected on the project and then cancelled it because they couldn't make it work. 10 years later I get a call. "Can you fix this"
"Yeah - I want my team back. (120 MSCE techies and Microsoft Trainers).You will need to find them, I don't have phone numbers or valid email addys for them. Everyone gets double pay. It is easy to fix and if that politician prick even shows his nose I'll break it.

CEO, legend that he is found all my techies. Every single one of them. Paid them the agreed rate and we completed the project in about 8 months. We still charged them 7 billion quid to be honest but if they had listened to a bunch of people who were doing this every day of the week 10 years earlier they might have got away with about half a million plus hardware

[zh]

I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's investigation of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Management told him - AFTER the explosion - that the chance of losing an orbiter was about 1 in 10, 000 launches. Actually they did 135 launches and lost two orbiters, so management thought the Shuttle system was 150 times safer than it actually was.

[LazyDaisyDay]

There is clearly an horrific lack of accountability at Boeing. The only real surprise to ordinary consumers (passengers) like me, is that no one at the senior management level has yet been prosecuted. Criminal charges feel long overdue...

[georgedyson]

These deferred deals need to be stopped. Individual, especially senior management, need to face direct accountability PERSONALLY - and even jail time needs to be a possible outcome..Paying off a penalty from the company is not a satisfactory way to improve the future as it is not the management's money and they are not financially impacted directly.
It is the DECISION makers that need to be held accountable NOT the company.

[UR_Mind]

I've grown up in Seattle, and lived here my entire life so far (30 years or so). Most of my family works for Boeing. The real nail in their coffin happened when they decided to move management out of state, after finishing the 777 back in the '90s. The 787, 737 max, the 777 max project, the Orion capsule, and a few military projects, are suffering because management is mentally and physically too far from where these planes are actually being manufactured. I've thought this for a long time, so these incidents don't exactly surprise me, which is sad. As soon as accountants, and not engineers started running things at Boeing, things started going down hill fast.

I'm not saying this is the current problem with boeing, just the start of the ones their facing now. This company has been such a big part of my life, and it's being run by morons right now. It makes me so angry. Old Boeing had its share of problems, don't get me wrong, but they weren't trying to kill someone every time a plane took off.

It reminds me, my mom asked me if I wanted to work in airline manufacturing or engineering because of how much I like aviation. I told her I didn't want to learn French....

[Archangelm]

Put an engineer in charge, someone who gives zero f*cks about getting into fights with suits or shareholders.

[cennsadriver]

I was a quality systems engineer for over 20 years. Quality systems are as good as the managers that support them.