It's long been understood that if a plane sets a trap for a pilot, the solution is to eliminate the trap and not to say "pilot error".

A single point of failure would have been unthinkable.

The black box I worked on was only important enough to turn on a yellow light if it failed, and it ran the same algorithms in parallel on two processors with inputs inverted and logic DeMorganized, and it had a backup, and IIRC it could listen to more than one bus for air data.

Not just installing defective parts, but retaliating against the employee who reported it. Everything points to a decomposed culture, not a one-off or routinely fixable thing.

Long and interesting history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I talked to one aerospace engineer who said his company immediately destroyed defective parts so there would be no risk of accidentally installing them.
On top of that, in any healthy organization it would be unthinkable to install them deliberately.
On top of that, when someone reported the situation, it should have been corrected immediately.
On top of that, it is pathological to retaliate against someone for doing his job.
It is hard to imagine fixing a corporate culture so utterly rotten.

Wouldn't the Stefan Brands credential technology work to minimize privacy loss?

I read a memoir from a cocaine wholesaler who said that after 20 years in prison it didn't feel like punishment anymore, but just routine normal life.

There is room for a clear distinction between accidents on the one hand and deleting records for a coverup on the other.

There is also room to tell the difference between good faith screwups and deliberate neglect. Like when you retaliate against a QA person for reporting problems. https://www.seattletimes.com/b...

One of the reasons aviation was so safe for so long was indeed that people could own up to mistakes without going to prison. What Boeing has been up to appears to be well beyond mistakes.

Decades ago, they did. It was a gesture to their customers, "We're giving you business".

There's also the idea of keeping things longer when you know they might be needed. It would be like a legal hold for email.

Yep. What Boeing is saying has gone past unbelievable into unthinkable. Even in general aviation everything gets logged.

As a follow-up, I prefer sources that I pay for. They still have an incentive to keep me, but less so to do it second by second with hits of adrenaline. Look long enough and it's possible to find scrupulous truth tellers in many political positions.
Sigh. Craigslist is good, but when newspapers could pay reporters from advertising, that stabilized things.

Aviation culture has resisted criminal penalties in general. Yes, prison can make people afraid of screwing up, but it can also make them afraid of revealing mistakes so they can be fixed and learned from.
It sounds like the investigation is for breaking the non-prosecution agreement rather than for making a flagrant blunder.
Speaking of getting people to own up to mistakes, there's an anonymous reporting system where people can safely describe a situation even if they screwed up. Then the reporting system issues a tracking number. Then if there's ever enforcement action, the tracking number turns into a get out of jail free card.

I was a parachute rigger. No repack or patch was complete until logged and signed off.

What Boeing is claiming is unthinkable. It's much easier to believe that they are doing a coverup, which I hope can be prosecuted.

Some correlations are really persuasive.

There was a worldwide drop in violent crime, consistent across places with different policies, but always 16-20 years after each place phased out leaded gas.