Criminalization Threatens Aviation Safety - Episode 227
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 มิ.ย. 2024
- As Boeing continues to be the subject of investigations and congressional hearings the concept of criminalization has come to the forefront. This could have a devastating impact on aviation safety in the U.S. Special guest and aviation attorney Mark Dombroff focuses on efforts to criminalize the investigation of aviation accidents and incidents.
The effort to use criminal prosecutions to address aviation safety issues in the U.S. would dramatically impact the process of getting to the facts, including making witnesses more reluctant to come forward with details. Criminalizing will make the safety investigation process more difficult and less effective.
While some in the legal community favor criminalization, it is not the approach used in most of the world. Aviation accident investigation focuses on understanding what happened and how to prevent similar events in the future. A criminal investigation would shift the goals to assigning blame and handing out punishment.
Several notable past investigations came up during the discussion, including a fatal 2006 midair collision in Brazil involving a 737 and a corporate jet. The corporate jet pilots were detained in Brazil for several months and threatened with prosecution for almost 18 years. When TWA Flight 800 crashed, there was tension over whether the FBI or the NTSB would conduct the investigation.
Related documents are available at the Flight Safety Detectives website.
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Music: “Inspirational Sports” license ASLC-22B89B29-052322DDB8
Corporations don't deserve more rights than the rest of us. They certainly don't deserve blanket immunity from prosecution, particularly when deliberate misconduct is involved. But the FAA and the NTSB have always been way too friendly with the aircraft manufacturers, so it's not surprising that their former employees want to protect them too. Boeing is threatening aviation safety, not those who want to hold Boeing responsible. Judging by the number of unalived whistleblowers, Boeing already feels pretty confident that it can do absolutely whatever it wants and the worst it'll have to ever do is pay a fine here or a settlement there. Sucks for aviation, but the people running Boeing should have thought of that. Instead, they banked on being too big to fail.
WRONG! The NTSB has NEVER been "too friendly" with the aircraft manufacturers, nor do they have a reason to be. They can only make recommendations. It is the FAA that actually regulalates them, and the FAA has had many administrators who were downright criminals in that they regulated the industry exactly the way the industry wanted and then took a cushy directorship at some airline or manufacturer as their reward. That NEVER happens with the NTSB. Do NOT lump them in with the FAA. That's just dumb, dumb, dumb.
I seem to recall hearing that the French do their accident investigation with two teams. One team, the initial primary investigators, is looking at "what caused the accident". The second team spools up just a bit later and is looking for "is one of the causes something we need to prosecute someone for, and are we actually able to prosecute them?"
It's one of those things where IF there IS criminal conduct, it should be prosecuted. If it's something that isn't, it should NOT be prosecuted. The problem is a) figuring out if there was criminal conduct and b) figuring out how prosecutable it is! (IMO: If no law is broken, and there's no intent to break laws, any prosecutor filing charges should be himself charged.)
Should suppressing information that could lead to fatal outcomes be treated as criminal? Isn't that how people as individuals are treated? Should corporations be shielded from accountability when they don't take the initiative to correct their own mistakes?
Great episode, got me thinking about these questions as well...🤔
I guess Mark Dombroff has never had anyone kill their loved one. The DPA going on now was brought on by Boeing - it was a sweetheart deal to escape criminal trial and possible jail time of several managers and IMO lower level staff. If you want transparency in the industry, then tell Boeing management that they need to be transparent in their certification. THEY are the ones who brought this on to the industry. Any Flight Safety Detective who believes that this was pilot error needs to review all the facts.
Good show, all of you. My general observation is that we are already an overly litigious society. Please let's not expand that further.
In the end when you've spent a billion lobbying you expect some protection
if they did a Self-Reports within a certain short time , I would say that should be 100% criminal immunity, and protection from punitive civil charges.
I believe though, that intentional criminal actions should be punished... (usually that's more about management or sometimes the maintenance, rarely pilots.)
when we do talk about criminal, that should only be about Jail time or rights limitation, never about money, and it should be for things where the person clearly did something he KNEW was wrong and dangerous, and yet continued to do it. this can be for profit, or to satisfy some desire such as adrenaline or pride... but never out of a pure lapse in judgement such as forgetfulness...
for cooperate, I believe criminalization isn't bad, but only where it's warranted, and then, possibly with a view of treating attempts at circumventing agreed safety systems/accountability, as a kind of breaking of the oath... i.e.: they have committed themselves to a code of safety under our trust, if they break that, they should be criminally punished for that. (this should never be applied to non-managerial positions such as engineers or pilots, only to those who have a double responsibility to safety and to profit as members of company management)
How do you convince people who lose loved ones in aviation accidents, that holding someone (s) criminally responsible is not a worthwhile pursuit? If you “accidentally” kill someone with your car, you still face a murder 2 rap. If no one is at risk of going to jail, nothing will improve. Do what, make Calhoun pay a third of his $33M salary as a fine and call it good? And to ignore the two Max accidents as US aviation accidents is ridiculous. Safety since 2009 indeed.
The pilots allowed their planes to be crashed, not Boeing. Fundamental training of a runaway stabilizer would have saved them. Good maintenance crews would mean pilots rarely have such urgent failures. Sadly, it was the flight crews of the two MAXs that demonstrated poor performance (and poor training). The reason safety in the US is so high is because our airlines and training is uniformly excellent and constantly improving (along with the planes). Another is the NTSB who offer recommendations that contribute to safety. They tried to help the Lion Air and Ethiopian investigations, but their process and final report contained grave deficiences.
“If no one is at risk of going to jail, nothing will improve.” Why is it lawyers advise people to not volunteer information or allow themselves to be interviewed by law enforcement without a lawyer? Because of the risk of incriminating themselves. If what you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, how is that going to encourage disclosure? Litigation can take months and years-meanwhile, recommendations to the FAA for safety improvements are delayed if they are made at all. That’s why the NTSB can learn as much as they can as fast as they can to issue their reports of probable causes and recommendations that can be implemented sooner rather than later. If everyone is at risk of going to jail, everyone will get a lawyer. And every lawyer will tell their clients to keep their rights and not tell the NTBS a goddamn thing.
THANKS GUYS.......IM A INVESTATION BACKGROUND AND IM CONCERNED....AND I APPRECIATE YOUR KEEPING UP WITH IT......YES IM
AWARE OF NTSB AND FAA TAKING 2 YEARS TO COME BACK. THATS NOT GOOD ENOUGH......WE NEED SAFE FLIGHTS IN THE NOW
PAUL JOHN OTTAWA ONTARIO CANADA.
So respectfully, I feel like we are missing the forest through the trees with this discussion.
The whole reason that us aviation nerds advocate against criminalization of accidents is because we DESPERATELY need transparency in our investigations of accidents and incidents. If an air traffic controller is too afraid of criminal liability, they may not tell us an accurate story of why they directed two aircraft to the same runway at the same time, and that will mean it probably happens again.
The allegations against Boeing are related to Fraud, not criminal negligence. (Boeing entered a deferred prosecution agreement with the justice department over this.)
The way I see it, the potentially crimial conduct here WAS the act of fraudulently withholding information from the FAA, and the accidents that followed are effectively just evidence of how serious that original act was.
This is all to say... We don't get anything from avoiding prosecution here, Boeing was (allegedly) already defrauding and consealing information about what was going wrong before any accident happened.
Boeing and the FAA were guilty of one thing: believing the pilots of the MAX planes would have been well-trained and will respond appropriately. That’s what crashed the planes: bad assumptions, bad maintenance and bad pilot performance. The MCAS was part of the auto trim system and they assessed an MCAS failure as a trim system failure, and pilots are trained, or supposed to be trained, what to do for that). The Lion Air crash had a month of poor maintenance leading up to the installation of a AOA vane _they did not calibrate._ Had they done so, MCAS wouldn’t have activated with erroneous data (which it did with the previous crew on the accident aircraft, yet the plane kept flying. Why blame Boeing for MCAS when they had nothing to do with poor maintenance, poor training and poor performance? Why?) The Ethiopian MAX crash had a bird (or other foreign object) strike the AOA vane on takeoff, and the problems that followed were not addressed in the cockpit, showing some rudimentary lapses in basic airmanship (for example, not once did the pilots mention airspeed, a factor that the NTSB said “played a significant role in the accident sequence of events.” Go read their comments yourself).
@@darkprose to be clear, I 1000% agree that there were major issues with maintenance and airmanship of the 737 max crashes. I don't blame Boeing for the crashes any more than I blame the pilots, engineers, or safety system present.
My point is simply that Boeing's allegedly criminal misconduct hid major design problems from the FAA, and that is a crime in and of itself, even if no crash had ever happened. (see www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-conspiracy-and-agrees-pay-over-25-billion )
15:25 Asiana flight 214 at SFO does not count as a catastrophic crash? Is it because it is a foreign carrier?
In retrospect, we should have included that event. While it was a non-U.S. carrier, it was certified by the FAA to operate in the U.S.
29:30:00
the mafia tend to be generally very protective of the family... the Union is very much a development of the mafia in more civilized means... it is bound that the methods/culture is somewhat related...
I can buy criminal charges if the wrong doing was intentional for all persons in all industries and government agencies responsible.
"Be legit so they can't say s#@t."
Who said that? That's a good quote.
@@katrinarucker9773 A rapper named Easy-E.
I have doubts regarding the claim that the US is the safest aviation system in the world. How about the EU? Some countries like the UK have been extremely safe. I'm not saying the claim is groundless but I'm just curious.
Fraud and negligence are fair game. On the other hand, the general aviation manufacturing industry has been decimated through lawsuits over aircraft and components that are not maintained over the many decades of their lifespan. The industry cannot be held accountable for every "gyro failure" in an IMC accident or the failure to implement an AD for a 60+ year-old aircraft.
An aircraft needs to be retired earlier if they can't be maintained to a safe standard. The airline industry wants to squeeze every last penny out of their aircraft. If it can't be maintained and operated reliability, it should be retired.
The industry absolutely MUST be held accountable. Seems like the aircrafts lifecycle should be much shorter if it's not safe to operate.
@@erickim9237 That's not the point. Cessna and Piper are not responsible for someone crashing their 1966 plane when one of thousands made is involved. They are not accountable for 60 years of maintenance. Are you going to sue GM when you wreck your 1960 Buick?
@@cturdo I'm speaking for flights flown in part 121 and 135. Not part 91.
@@erickim9237 Yes I agree. However, whenever deep pockets are needed, it's easier to settle a lawsuit even when there is no guilt. That's why new 172s are 600k and insurance is unaffordable.