The Competency Crisis: Flying Blind With Boeing

Fly Boeing and get taken out of your comfort zone like never before

It was recently reported that U.S. regulators have ordered Boeing to temporarily ground all 171 planes of their new 737-9 Max fleet. In a statement, Boeing claimed:

We agree with and fully support the FAA’s decision to require immediate inspections of 737-9 airplanes with the same configuration as the affected plane

The “affected plane” was Alaska Airlines flight 1282 flying from Portland to California which was forced to make an emergency landing back in Portland after a door-size section of paneling blew out mid-flight, leaving the horrified passengers gawping into the night sky and watching as their iPhones disappeared through the vortex. One young man had the t-shirt he was wearing sucked off his back, a mother had to desperately cling onto her baby lest he too entered the void.

The Guardian explains the situation at Boeing thus:

The Boeing 737 Max 9 at the center of Friday’s events rolled off the assembly line and received its certification two months ago, according to online FAA records. Boeing said it was working to gather more information and was ready to support the investigation.

Alaska Air and United Airlines are the only US carriers using the Max 9. Alaska Air canceled 160 flights on Saturday, or 20% of scheduled trips, while United canceled 104 flights or 4% of departures.

The Max is the newest version of Boeing’s venerable 737, a twin-engine, single-aisle plane frequently used on US domestic flights. The plane went into service in May 2017.

Two Max 8 planes crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people and leading to a near two-year worldwide grounding of all Max 8 and Max 9 planes. They returned to service only after Boeing made changes to an automated flight-control system implicated in the crashes.

Max deliveries have been interrupted at times to fix manufacturing flaws. In December, the company told airlines to inspect the planes for a possible loose bolt in the rudder-control system.

Some years ago after a terrorist attack, I remember reading an article on a (now gone) website that contrasted the extreme safety measures taken by the aviation industry with the policies of our governments regarding demographics and public safety. If a plane flies into a mountain and hundreds of people are now dead, it can be reasonably expected that we will be provided with an answer and that the investigation into what happened will be comprehensive. Let me be clear, the fact of mass transportation through the skies is an absolute marvel of Western ingenuity and organizational brilliance. Nevertheless, the outcome least wanted is the plane flying into a mountain, hitting the ground like a dart, or sinking into the waves.

There are 6 million parts on a Boeing 747, and the safety standards and regulatory bodies of the aviation industry would demand that every one of those parts be investigated and that every second leading up to the collision with the mountain was logged, tracked, and run through computer simulations in order to prevent such a tragedy ever happening again. Perhaps it was more than one problem, perhaps the navigation systems had failed and the pilot was drunk, or depressed. Maybe a cable within the steering systems had frozen or snapped. The possibilities are endless, but whatever it was would be discovered.

Now, in the corresponding scenario, we have a pop concert where 22 teenage girls were blown to pieces by a terrorist. If we apply the same rigorous standards to the pop concert as were applied by the aviation industry, what do we learn? The outcome is that the plane has flown into the mountain again, but this time for politicians and the liberal intelligentsia. Some policies and actions do not result in dead teenage girls at pop concerts, and there are courses of action and policies that will result in that very outcome. Was the potential for risk and hazard present beforehand? Like ice on wing flaps? Was the risk known? Were the conditions that resulted in dead girls at a pop concert known ahead of time? Are the politicians aware that certain demographics carry with them increased risk, not just in terms of terrorism but violent crime?

The difference between the two scenarios of course is that the safety protocols within the aviation industry were not political. There is no ‘‘Union of Drunken Pilots’’ making a special case pleading for an exception to the rules or being cushioned and cosseted by the authorities because the outcome of such a policy is mass death. There are, however, myriad laws and politically enforced speech codes to hamper honest discussion about terrorism, crime, and how it relates to protected demographics.

To push the comparison a little further, imagine a scenario wherein the CEOs of airline companies had, like the politicians, to adhere to a set of ideas that increased negative outcomes. Or, and I believe this is key in both scenarios, reducing the ability to prevent negative outcomes.

From Boeing’s Global Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Report.

When the side of the fuselage tears off and you find yourself weathering the de-pressurizing vacuum and admiring your live view of the peaks of the Catskill Mountains, remember that diversity was at the table of important decisions leading up to your precarious situation.

Jaida West loves to be taken outside of her comfort zone, and so will you be as you try to wrap an oxygen mask around the face of your traumatized child at 30,000ft.

Indeed, upon viewing Boeing’s “Talent Pipeline” I note that my own comfort zone has been reduced to just 29.9% of the workforce.

I want Boeing to reassure me, to keep me firmly in my comfort zone. Instead, I get to “Meet Indica”, the young black man testing the impact of vibrations on airplanes:

Whether tuning a guitar, testing vibration impacts on airplanes, or listening for people’s pronouns, Indica Bennett knows that sounds matter.

Indica, who uses the pronouns he/they, has created personal and professional harmony while working at Boeing, where they can be their authentic self and turn their love of music into a rewarding career.

When Indica started with us, they included pronouns in their email signature and a few teammates asked them how to properly use gender-neutral terms. Indica, an active member of our Boeing Employees Pride Alliance Business Resource Group, used the opportunities to share information and resources about the LGBTQIA+ community that could help others initiate and navigate conversations in the workplace and with family and friends.

Boeing isn’t joking in its diversity drive. Their numbers speak for themselves.

The 737 model fuselage that lost a panel mid-flight was made by a company called Spirit Aerosystems, based in Kansas. Ah yes, clever, Boeing is merely paying lip service to the “Woke Agenda” while outsourcing the actual engineering to boring white men in their fifties.

Except:

Just to be clear, I have no evidence whatsoever that the Spirit Women gals had a hand in the current travails at Boeing that have resulted in the grounding of an entire fleet of planes. However, I can say with some certainty that the money and resources allocated to “attracting, engaging and developing women specifically in Engineering and Technology” were not being allocated to ensuring the plane did not fly into the mountain. Indeed, flying passengers from point A to point B safely and comfortably is clearly not even the desired outcome — representation is. The PR blurb festooning the websites of prominent players in the aviation industry holds it as axiomatic that increased diversity and representation of selected groups will automatically and logically result in a better, safer service. The explanations as to why this is so are very heavy on corporate jargon and soundbites. Fact-based arguments are totally absent.

It behooves us here to put a fine point on what, exactly, we mean by the term “Competency Crisis”. Does it merely refer to institutions hiring more women and black people or other minority groups? The answer is no. The Competency Crisis is the result of introducing unnecessary risks and hazards into complex organizational systems.

Consider this basic representation of a flow chart on quality control in manufacturing:

At each step in the process, a human being is responsible for vetting the product. The desired outcome is to reduce the number of faulty products leaving the warehouse to as few as possible, preferably zero. The product is tested before it goes into mass production to reduce costs in the event it is faulty. If the product enters mass production and then is found to be faulty it is a loss but it still has further steps to go before acquiring a stamp of approval. Naturally, some nodes in the process carry more responsibility than others, but all can break down due to human error. Broadly speaking, it is better to have a human error at the beginning of the process than at the end because there are still multiple fail-safes and checks before the product reaches the customer.

As we have seen above, the diversity hiring practices in the aviation industry not only favour outcomes related to representation over securely transporting passengers but simultaneously seek to influence all(!) steps of the process at the same time. Thus, to return to the blown-out panel of the Alaskan Airlines flight, where was the actual fault? Was it a problem with design? Engineering? Material? Or perhaps quality control was in error?

We do not know, and we probably never will know because aviation hiring practices have become a matter of politics as much as a matter of flying people around in safety.

It is of course true that airplanes crashed or were found to be faulty during the days when it was entirely a white and male affair, however, there was no ideological dogma on the line, no incentive to protect incompetence and poor practice.

Five years ago a blog post was written contrasting the risk reduction practices of the aviation industry with the policies that led to terror attacks because the aviation industry was largely apolitical. Once captured and politicized, an institution becomes enslaved to ideological narratives and Machiavellian incentives. Note that, officially it has never been admitted why Sweden accrued “No-Go Zones” and extraordinarily high rates of rape. The truth becomes problematic and lost within a morass of political expediency.

In fairness, the planes have not yet started falling from the skies. Perhaps they never will. Perhaps AI will once more be cast in the role of absolving progressivism of its sins. The chances are that what we will increasingly see are anomalies, bizarre occurrences without comprehensive explanations or closure. The familiar, nagging feeling that “it didn’t used to be this way” gradually, and inevitably, leads to a breakdown of trust in yet another compromised complex system.

The ability to sit comfortably in a metal tube five miles above the earth is taken for granted, as are the internet cables dangling over cliffs under the Atlantic Ocean. We treat civilizational capstones and wonders as trivialities with the most astounding arrogance and indifference. The men responsible for such miraculous displays of engineering brilliance are gleefully and proudly purged from their positions. Sadly, we all know what comes after pride…