>including door specialists, who we believed would have relevant information.
Yes, by telling the NTSB to ask the door specialists "which of you installed the door", instead of having proper documentation on who did exactly what work. If the workers can't answer the question, now Boeing can wash its hands clean and blame the workers.
I doubt the workers themselves keep track of which specific planes they worked on- and they shouldn't need to, this is project management.
The aeronautical safety culture specifically avoids blaming individuals, and prefers focusing on procedural and organisational issues. If one person made a mistake, why didn't the rest of the organisation around them catch it and prevent it from causing a problem?
I don't think the NTSB is going to look kindly on Boeing if they even try to throw the techs under the bus.
> I doubt the workers themselves keep track of which specific planes they worked on- and they shouldn't need to, this is project management.
Didn't they find loose/missing bolts on other aircraft? Talking to employees who worked on other planes around this time seems like it would still be extremely important for this investigation.
From the GP: ">"Early in the investigation, we provided the NTSB with names of Boeing employees, including door specialists, who we believed would have relevant information. "
How is that Boeing refusing to provide employee names based on the quote in the comment you are replying. I'm assuming on good faith the GP's quote is from the TFA.
The NTSB asked Boeing for the names of the specific people on the team that replaced that door, and they said Boeing hasn't provided that. In Boeing's response, they didn't say they provided that, either. They said they provided "names of Boeing employees, including door specialists, who we believed would have relevant information." If they had actually provided the names of the crew that did the work, they'd have said they did exactly that rather than giving a lawyerish sidestep. I don't even think that the people who'd have done the actual repairs were even Boeing employees. Isn't a big part of the criticism that this work is farmed out? Not positive, though: that could have been work for one of the other recent Boeing catastrophes.
The question is not "which team is responsible for installing or removing the plug?" it is explicitly "which specific people did this specific job?".
Boeing is meant to have the answer to the second part documented - because that's how QA in this type of operation is meant to work: you document the people who did the task, and they document the exact tasks they did, you document the people who checked the task completion, and they document what they checked and the outcome of those checks.
In software terms if it helps the NTSB is asking "which engineer landed this change?" and Boeing is responding with "this is the team that maintains that code".
The reason the NTSB wants to know the exact people involved is not to assign blame. The goal, and sole reason the NTSB exists, is to determine why an accident occurred, so they can work out what needs to happen to stop it happening again. So the NTSB needs to know the exact people involved, so it can interview them, and see what they were doing and experiencing leading up to and during the maintenance work that may have contributed to the accident. These interviews are what led NTSB to find out things like sleep issues contributing to accidents, and so investigate what issues were leading to those sleep issues, etc which is why there are now strict rules about pilot flight times and scheduling changes. These interviews with the actual people involved are _extremely_ valuable for reducing recurrence of accidents.
The fact that numerous other aircraft were found with missing bolts and similar implies something systemic is occurring in the installation of these plugs (imo the core issue is the attempts to make the plugs "permanent" leading to inspection of these connection points being essentially impossible is the core issue, but also that Boeing missed the issue repeatedly shows something else is wrong). So interviewing the people doing the work will presumably shine a light on what is causing the oversights, which again, is the goal of the NTSB.
> The reason the NTSB wants to know the exact people involved is not to assign blame. The goal, and sole reason the NTSB exists, is to determine why an accident occurred, so they can work out what needs to happen to stop it happening again.
Anyone who has ever worked at basically any corporation knows this is career suicide. If Boeing ever discloses who that person is, he will effectively be barred from working in aviation for the rest of his career, full stop.
1. Pilots, even those responsible for accidents, talk to the NTSB, and unless grossly negligent continue to be pilots. The people who do get blackballed are the ones that actually report unsafe behavior before accidents occur.
2. If someone was unreasonably negligent in a way that caused an accident or death, then they should not still be working in a field that impacts safety of others
3. If conditions at Boeing are what are causing these failures, then not interviewing the people who made the mistake means that the mistakes will happen again, until people actually do die.
I'd like to know if you can point to cases where people who were not entirely at fault for an accident were forever unable to work in the industry, given you're saying that everyone knows it's career suicide I would expect every NTSB report of this kind to have resulted in the responsible parties being forever unable to work in the field, so this should be a long list.
But also, if Boeing knows who this person is, and would fire them because of it, why would they not have already fired them? If they had, why would the person not have gone to the NTSB? and similar basic follow ups to your logic.
It just seems super weird that you're claiming that no one talks to the NTSB because it's career suicide, when objectively the NTSB has spent decades interviewing everyone they can find that is involved in accidents.
Just because boeing tells the investigators the name of the individual the name does not “get released”. NTSB reports most of the time describe people in general terms such as “the captain of the accident flight” or “maintainer 2”.
Then the assumption is that it is a single individual, when it is most likely multiple people. (There were multiple aircrafts found with the missing screws.)
Then of course you are also assuming a gender. Not everyone who works on airplanes is a male you know.
> would you knowingly hire the same maintenance engineer who installed a door that failed
Yes. Assuming that it wasn’t an intentional act of sabotage, my answer is yes. We don’t get good results by assuming that nobody makes mistakes.
> > would you knowingly hire the same maintenance engineer who installed a door that failed
> Yes. Assuming that it wasn’t an intentional act of sabotage, my answer is yes. We don’t get good results by assuming that nobody makes mistakes.
And in fact that's the whole point of these interviews. A safety system that fails if a single person makes a mistake indicates a failure of the safety system, not the individual that actually made the mistake. The design of the system is meant to be such that even if one of there was a mechanic that was trying to intentionally sabotage the maintenance it would not result in a safety issue.
The NTSB redacts the names of individuals. None of the names Boeing hands over will ever be known to the public. No one will know they were interviewed by the NTSB nor who said what (even Boeing won't know that). At worst the final report will say "Engineer 1", "Engineer 2", etc.
It is deliberately done this way to avoid the issue you describe. If people knew talking to the NTSB could get them doxxed and fired it would make cooperation impossible.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you
even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article
mentions that".
It also is quite the assumption that the article was not read, but a salient detail was skipped, misunderstood, or any other less malevolent possibilities.
That’s a guideline and not a rule, and frankly it’s a rather poor one given that people pretty routinely don’t read the article and then miss important points.
The NTSB is literally asking for names. That’s what Boeing is allegedly refusing to provide.