…has admitted to its crime of murder, and should plead guilty.
I wonder what penalty the judge will impose, other than compensating the families for the incompensable?
…has admitted to its crime of murder, and should plead guilty.
I wonder what penalty the judge will impose, other than compensating the families for the incompensable?
Note the article was by the lawyer for the families.
There are individuals who are responsible.
They should be charged with 350 counts of manslaughter.
Pour encourager les autres.
Pour encourager les autres has a deeper meaning.
Apparently, a British admiral was hanged for dereliction of duty for not engaging the French navy to relieve a beleagured Mediterranean outpost. The admiral’s excuse was that his fighting the French at this point would have been an exercise in futility, so he retreated to fight another day, as it were, but his superiors didn’t see it that way.
Voltaire (i.e. famous French writer) satirized the British for doing this, where a character in Candide speaks of an unnamed country with a peculier habit of killing one of their admirals, every now and then, to instill obedience by way of terrorizing the remaining admirals. It reflects on the French viewing the British by killing their own admiral as the British doing the work of the French navy on their behalf.
In other words, Voltaire viewed the British as being “deadly silly” in conducting this execution because some principle of justice required it.
In everyday usage, to the extent that expressions in French are part of the everyday vocabulary of speakers of English, it is used to denote working under a heavy-handed authority, could be the government, could be your boss in the private sector, with the habit of handing out severe punishments to keep the persons under that authority in line.
Ultimately, the goal is to have a fleet of jet airliners taking us where we want to go, both economically and safely. Boeing failed at that, but somehow I don’t think we know the fully story about how and why they failed. But it would be important to know more about this story, in my opinion, to avoid this happening in the future than to take the stance, “Someone is at fault and is guilty of mass-manslaughter and ought to be punished” as the British did in hanging their admiral for cowardice?
Is that what you mean by “pour encourager les autres”, that a demand for justice is like hanging the British admiral when there was little he could have done to save the garrison? Or do you mean it in earnestness, that severe punishment must be applied as a deterrent?
Voltaire was satirizing a process he did not understand.
When Admiral Byng was court-martialed for not doing his utmost in relieving Minorca, it was likely a travesty of justice: There was not much he could do, but taking a hastily assembled fleet of ships in poor condition, and then losing a battle with the French fleet did not satisfy the Admiralty or the Crown. Tough audience.
Shooting him certainly encouraged officers of the Royal Navy for the next 250 years, with nominally positive effects.
Meanwhile, the French laughed it off, and their Navy’s history and results show that, too. The French would usually fight bravely and stupidly, then lose. Or not fight, and lose (cf Toulon)
WRT Boeing, the conventional wisdom seems to be that nobody is REALLY going to ever pay for screwing up by the numbers, committing fraud by submitting doctored test reports, bad QA practices, etc. Sure, the company might pay a fine, the shareholders will lose a few cents per share, but as far as the people who screw up? They get promoted to higher levels of incompetence, or retire early, or at worst, have to find a new job, in a few years once the union is done fighting. Meanwhile, the practices that allowed the planes to crash continue to metastasize throughout every Boeing project.
But it would be important to know more about this story, in my opinion, to avoid this happening in the future than to take the stance, “Someone is at fault and is guilty of mass-manslaughter and ought to be punished” as the British did in hanging their admiral for cowardice?
It is possible for a group to commit a crime without any individual in that group doing so. A sum of lawful actions can be unlawful (typical case – when a reasonable person would be unaware of the consequences of the collective actions because they would ignorant of most of the actions and/or the harm that the actions would cause). But I don’t buy that happened here. There’s too much negligence and punishment of rule followers here for it to be so lawfully distributed. To go back to your concern, we do know more about this story.
For example, whistleblowers describes a culture of gross violation of safety and quality procedures. For example, leaving foreign objects (like metal shavings) in the structure of the plane; using known defective parts in planes; and harassing/punishing people who reported these deficiencies – especially when they reported in writing (such as by email).
You won’t get manslaughter out of that (as far as I can tell, none of it could be directly connected to the crashes). But when you punish people plant-wide for following documented safety and quality procedures. and reporting on violations of such, that’s at least gross negligence (and violation of whistleblower law) on the part of a bunch of identifiable people.
A real investigation would trace who violated laws and regulations, not just stop at the door to the building.
Boeing just got the F-47 contract. Is everyone feeling confident?
I haven’t felt so confident since I bought day-old sushi from the gas station in Furnace Creek!
I am long retired from the airline industry, but back in the day the gold standard for accident investigations was the work of the National Transportation Safety Board. You could rest assured as to three things about any NTSB investigation: 1) They were not fast. 2) They were grindingly thorough. 3) They were totally focused on finding out what happened, not who was to blame. Everybody cooperated with the NTSB.
Bring criminal charges into the equation and everybody will instantly lawyer up.
The investigations are long over. Time for the charges
When I was flying for the US Air Force, and an accident occurred, there was what was called the ‘collateral investigation board’. Two legally distinct boards, sharing the same investigative staff. One to determine what happened and how to prevent it, and the other to determine who was responsible (which could likely lead to criminal, i.e. court-martial) charges.
I was the subject of such a board once, and served on several as an investigator. Happily, never as a criminal defendant.
Also keep in mind that the NTSB doesn’t have legal teeth on their own to compel anyone who doesn’t want to deliver. They don’t even need to lawyer up, they can just refuse to deliver data.
Someone who is not NTSB needs to be working on who to blame however. Because that’s a huge part of why this happened in the first place. It wasn’t a subtle engineering or human error problem that can be addressed by making more rules to cover some edge cases. This was blatant rule breaking.
Boeing might have cleared out those people at fault, but I doubt it.
“Bring criminal charges into the equation and everybody will instantly lawyer up.”
And shut up.