Is Boeing in big trouble? World's largest aerospace firm faces 10 more whistleblowers after sudden death of two

Dragxito@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1478 points –
Is Boeing in big trouble? World's largest aerospace firm faces 10 more whistleblowers after sudden death of two
hindustantimes.com
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Guy who said "If I die, it is not suicide" dies of suicide right before important court date, and perfectly healthy and active person suddenly succumbs to rare antibiotics-resistant infection.

They just happened to work at the same company and die right before they could testify on the same thing.

This not being foul play is less likely than a global conspiracy.

Tbf the evidence for the second person is not strong - that stuff does legit happen.

But the first guy? Damn! That's enough right there.

Well isn't there a ruling in aircraft design and safety, that you calculate the probability of a certain failure and judge by its reoccurence if it was just random, or more than likely systematic?

I think i read this in context to the two MAX planes crashing in the exact same way. The first one was ruled as maybe just being some very very freak thing to happen, but it happening twice made it entirely implausible to be without systematic cause.

And well now it is happening twice in a few years with Boeing that weird things happen twice in a row with little time in between in relation to critical security flaws.

Well isn’t there a ruling in aircraft design and safety, that you calculate the probability of a certain failure and judge by its reoccurence if it was just random, or more than likely systematic?

It sounds like neither of us know the answer to that, so I choose not to comment on that matter.

I think i read this in context to the two MAX planes crashing in the exact same way.

But how does that apply? One guy was a "suicide", the other was bacteria - you just said it yourself, the metric only works if they crash "in the exact same way", therefore by your own words, this seems to not apply?

There is a natural human bias to want to "know" things. Sometimes we even make shit up out of desperation to fill that void, but the more honest way (but HARD to do, emotionally, as in it seriously goes against the grain of our pattern-finding brain's natural instinctual algorithms) is to simply say "I do not know the answer here". Please don't misunderstand me as saying that it is likely that the second guy was not killed - that would be 100% tangential to what I am trying to convey!

Rather, I am saying that the first guy looks to have been Epstein-ed, but we don't know enough yet about the second guy. Could you imagine someone sent to kill him, and having a whole plan in place so that he wouldn't even make it home but rather be taken care of in the car on the way there, but then he dies in his hospital bed first -> do you still get paid!?:-P Asking the important questions here!!:-D

But again, what happened to the first guy is already enough to know that some shady shit is going on. And yeah, that should make us think twice about the second guy... but having done so, I think that we just don't know enough there to make a firm determination like we could for the first guy, without additional evidence. Which does not absolve Boeing one iota for being so shitty for the last few years.

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I agree, that we cannot rule either death to be an assassination by itself. But their distinct occurrence in this context, e.g. that they prevent whistleblowers from testifying warrants an in depth investigation into both of them. In particular given the circumstances it is sketchy if Police or other officials are eager to close the case and rule it as non assassinations, without actually analyzing what was going on.

I don't know the relevant laws there - but I am certain that an autopsy would have been done? Beyond that, what more could be done? If that means a more expensive autopsy, then yeah they should do that - even Boeing might agree on that point, to help absolve them, even if they did somehow give the bacteria to the guy, but like if they were confident that it could not be traced to them in that manner.

Speaking of, even if they were guilty in this second case, that's a very different thing than someone being able to prove it. "Innocent until proven guilty" is a foundational bedrock principle in the USA, and we cannot simply throw that away without losing something precious.

And with them being military contractors, they probably have classified status to where local police can't just go subpoenaing their records willy nilly. I could be wrong though. Then again, if they are used to dealing with the likes of e.g. literal Russian spies, then surely they would be smart enough to not leave a paper trail on something like this to begin with?

But the first guy should already be enough to start an investigation. The second guy... I dunno what that one means, maybe yes but also might not be.

There can be far more done than just an autopsy in the second case. Is there a register who has entered and left the building? Is there camera footage showing anyone accessing the room that had no business being there? Is there anything unusual in the nurses schedules? Were all procedures followed according to the rules, especially sanitary rules?

These are all things that should be investigated. If they show no signs of irregularities then the case can be closed. If there is irregularities, then these need to be investigated further, and then the question of motive comes into play, where there is one party with a very strong motive to silence the guy.

I presumed all of that would already be done. Then again, perhaps not. Then again, a giant military industrial contractor may have ways around such anyway, which doesn't mean that we shouldn't look, though either way I would expect the situation to at least superficially look innocent.

You could write a letter, maybe get a petition signed to back it up, to the hospital and ask that their internal security do such? Or the police in that local area.

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Tbf, you did come out fairly condescending and combative, telling people what to do and how wrong they are, and even essentially calling them names. Putting aside being correct or not, people don't take kindly to being told in that manner!:-P

But it's not all bad, and that separates this place from Reddit. The latter I just never visit anymore, b/c there is simply no longer any point to do so. In contrast, this place is full of crap... but it's not all crap, and that's... well that's... something, I guess:-).

Also, I kid - it's generally significantly better than crap - it definitely contains crap, but it's also got a lot of good stuff too.:-)

This post though is probably a lost cause indeed:-P.

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As Lemmy grows, it will attract all kinds of people. And many - e.g. lemmygrad.ml and the person who wrote the Lemmy code to begin with - are outright tankies (as far as I understand that word, it seems to mean: die-hard communists, aka such extreme leftists that they have wrapped around to becoming authoritarian rightists except with left-wing talking points, which ofc they do not see the irony in that, thinking that the correctness of their cause entitles them to act in an identical manner as the "other side" that they purportedly despise).

And like Reddit, some are literal and actual children, or at least younger people, so there's that to consider.

But aside from all of that, people are people, and that's just the way it is, I suppose. And even on top of that, sometimes as we dig we find that we have more in common than first appeared, so some of it is pure communication style. e.g. someone saying "let's not hastily jump to conclusions" and someone saying "hey, we should investigate this!" might be saying the same thing, in a roundabout way. Plus too many react to the "tone" of a message more than its content, and on and on it goes...

All we can do is focus on our own parts that we ourselves have control over:-).

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Exactly! It's literally a service done to the Truth, which is the main goal for many of us, not to have a feeling of being "correct" or lording that over others or vengeance against someone we do not particularly like as in out- vs. in-group dynamics, but rather to rise above all of that shit and find stuff that really matters.

Put another way: if I make a correct statement, and then follow it up with two incorrect statements, then people should not trust me, hrm? Or Lemmy. Or perhaps this community. "They" get to then state how "wrong" we are - correctly! And making the other side be correct... is something that we should revile and fill us with disgust:-D.

Which is why perhaps how we say something is almost as important as what we say, I am learning, and thought I would share that also with you. Full disclosure: I am usually very bad at it, which is why I want to learn to get better.

Again, a dozen whistleblowers now, and 2 died fairly quickly after coming out.

Maybe Boeing will learn from their mistakes and go for using their relatives as leverage or tarnishing their reputation by framing them with treason instead.

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I don’t know if that’s a rule of thumb or not, but it certainly makes sense.

First, the world of reliability runs on data and math. Lots of statistics, of course.

And second, aircraft are over-engineered for safety margins on top of safety margins. The test data might say you need a part that’s X thickness of aluminum in order to be 99% sure to never fail in the field. So let’s just make it 3X thickness to be safe!

So from that standpoint, back to back failures should pretty much always draw a bunch of attention in this industry.

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I did do the math on it and the second guy only had a 1 in 3630 chance of dying of natural causes in that time window.

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https://lemmy.world/comment/9809397

I admit I am not a stats guy. Please tell me what I did wrong in my math. Totally open to being corrected here.

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Ok can you give me an actual number?

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We do ourselves no favors by sounding like conspiracy nutjobs who are uninterested in facts. When they go low, we should retain the high road, imho.

Edit: this... basically means tangentially what I had intended to say, so it is better off to be deleted, though I will leave it as strikethrough for the historical record (I really hate all those "deleted" messages, and don't want to contribute one of my own too!).

Yeah yeah I suck, get in line and take a number. Now, will attacking me bring those two murdered men back to life?

I apologize for my wording - I agree with you that I was out of line. There was some point I was trying to make, about the need to be cautious with our wording, but somehow I ended up doing the exact thing I was trying to warn about, didn't I? Fwiw I don't actually think that you suck at all - I was just really, Really, REALLY bad at expressing myself there.:-) Thank you for not returning the favor in like manner.

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There's 2 kinds of evidence.

  • Circumstantial evidence - relies on an inference to connect it to the conclusion (e.g. guy saying before hand he won't kill himself).
  • Direct evidence - no additional inference/evidence is needed (e.g. video of a guy going up to the car and shooting him).

The guy saying he won't kill himself requires inferring that he's being truthful when he said it and that he didn't change his mind. It's not non-evidence, it does point to suicide being less likely. But it's far from conclusive. If there's no sign of entering the vehicle or that a struggle occurred, then I'd argue that far outweighs his prior statement.

They just happened to work at the same company and die right before they could testify on the same thing.

That's also a common misunderstanding, at least regarding the first (I'm not as familiar with the second). I'm a bit unclear on the details of the deposition - which side wanted it and was asking the questions, etc. (detailed here) but whatever the case, it was Boeing that demanded he come back for one more day. So if Boeing wanted him to not testify that day, they'd just send him home as originally planned. The only reason they'd do it then was to silence him generally...but doing it in a way that draws so much suspicion to them seems like an implausibly bad decision. Then again, it is Boeing. (Note that this is also circumstantial evidence, and requires assuming that Boeing isn't so dumb as to kill a witness in the middle of their own deposition, which may not be warranted).

Edit: corrected my own misunderstanding of deposition

Its also inferring his friend is being truthful when he said that's what the guy said.

there’s no sign of entering the vehicle

Hey.

Yeah?

See this gun?

I do.

Kill yourself with it or I will kill everyone in your family. Here is a list of their names and addresses.

What if I kill you instead?

Guys who sent me will send someone else.

That guy also had a history of mental issues and anxiety. He was away from home experiencing high stress environments, like a court room, and he was looking at another court appearance that day.

It doesn't take a genius to see that maybe, just maybe, this is a coincidence instead of murder. He had already given the bulk of his testimony, so I really don't see the motive here.

Yes. What you are listing are coincidences.

Also understand that it is pretty rare for a whistleblower to have any future in the industry they are blowing the whistle on. That is throwing away years of schooling and often decades of experience. People tend to not do that if they aren't already ill and not expecting a long life.

As for "if I die, it is not suicide": Gonna get real dark for a moment. A lot of people are just looking for a way to make their life, or death, matter. Someone realizing they don't want to put themselves and their family through a very long trial might very well use that as an excuse to take the easy way out.

All that said: Obviously these need to be investigated. But there is a big difference between investigating a suspicious death and immediately jumping to conspiracy.

Even looking at it from a statistical perspective, these are low chances.

Let's do the numbers.

Suicide rate is 14 / 100,000 (0.00014).

Deaths from MRSA in the US in 2017 was 20,000 / 325,100,000 (0.000062).

The chance of either happening to one person is 0.000202 (0.02%). The chance of it happening to 2/12 whistleblowers in the same year is:

1-((1−(14÷100,000))×(1−(20,000÷325,100,000)))^6 =

0.00120845658 (0.12%),

1 out of 826 cases with 12 whistleblowers would have this outcome.

And suicide rates go up drastically when people are overly stressed and think they have no future. Sort of like... having contributed to incredibly dangerous air travel and burning bridges with an entire industry.

Similarly, like I said, a lot of whistleblowers are ill to begin with. Because, again, it is throwing away your future in an industry. It is a lot easier to consider that when your future on this planet is measured in years or even months.

A LOT of documentaries/youtubes/whatever love to point out "the big evil company is ruining this man's life when he is just trying to get his chemotherapy so that he can have a few more months with his family". Which is indeed horrible (and why any good lawyer gets the testimony on record ASAP because people ARE pushed to suicide). But also kind of ignores that said company didn't give them cancer... Unless we are having a repeat of the COVID conspiracy theories too.

Better than 1 in a thousand, makes it seem less unlikely.

It means that there is a 99.998% chance that they were murdered, misdiagnosed or are not really dead.

There haven't even been 1000 whistleblowers cases in recorded history, and the fact that the two deaths happened means the most likely cause by far was murder

The SEC had 12k. Whistle blower tips in 2022 alone, so I'm going to say that less then 1000 cases in recorded history is a lie.

We are talking in the context of with 12 whistleblowers on the same case. There are more cases with single wistleblowers, but also, the fewer whistleblowers per case, the lower the chance of one of them dying of suicide or MRSA.

For example, if there had only been 2 whistleblowers in total in this case, not 12, the chance of both dying from suicide and MRSA would be 0.00014 * 0.000062 = 0.00000000868 (0.000000868%).

And you are still enacting conspiracy theory 101. You have a questionable fact that you are going to keep drilling down on and use to justify every single claim you have. But you completely ignore why suicide rates might be higher for people in a whistleblower situation or why people might be at heightened risk of medical complications in 2024. And why that may also have a link to deciding to throw away a career in the interest of the public good.

And the worst part? This will do exactly what every other nutbrain conspiracy theory does. It provides incredibly easy to refute accusations and then undermines anyone who actually cares about how much boeing knowingly allowed. Because all the people who will point out exactly what these whistleblowers fought to get out there? They are dragged down by your ranting and raving.

Maybe it was murder, maybe it was just two tragic deaths. Time will tell. But let's focus on the actual accusations rather than make up some because we want a really juicy true crime podcast?

The chance of killing youself after saying you're not killing yourself negates any raised suicide rate of whistleblowers, and when the chance of foulplay is vastly higher than it not being foulplay, it is no longer a conspiracy theory. Having two whistleblowers from the same case suddenly die is extremely unlikely.

I didn't make up any accusations. I stated how it is vastly more likely they were murdered than that they weren't if I removed any circumstantial information. Adding circumstantial information very likely sways it even further into murder territory, and not the opposite as you claim.

And the worst part? This will do exactly what every other nutbrain conspiracy theory does. It provides incredibly easy to refute accusations and then undermines anyone who actually cares about how much boeing knowingly allowed. Because all the people who will point out exactly what these whistleblowers fought to get out there? They are dragged down by your ranting and raving.

This is such a ridiculous argument when your argument essentially is shilling for a company and trying to downplay how suspicious this whole thing is. By easily refutable you must mean "maybe a meteor killed both" levels of stars aligning.

But let's focus on the actual accusations rather than make up some because we want a really juicy true crime podcast?

Them being murdered automatically becomes an actual accusation.

Assassinations are not a rare occurrence, but you're making it sound like fairy tale material.

The chance of killing youself after saying you’re not killing yourself negates any raised suicide rate of whistleblowers,

Ah, thank you for explaining that.

A quick google that has totally gotten me on a list says that it is estimated that about 5-10% of people who have attempted suicide will die by suicide within a year. Many of those people were talked down and said they weren't going to... until they did.

and when the chance of foulplay is vastly higher than it not being foulplay,

Citation requested

Having two whistleblowers from the same case suddenly die is extremely unlikely.

Oh, is that the entirety of it? Okay. Planes tend to not have doors fall off. So if there are multiple doors falling off of planes it can't possibly be a systemic issue. It is actually an evil conspiracy theory out to attack Boeing. Because anything else by my poorly defined metrics is extremely unlikely

I didn’t make up any accusations. I stated how it is vastly more likely they were murdered than that they weren’t if I removed any circumstantial information. Adding circumstantial information very likely sways it even further into murder territory, and not the opposite as you claim.

So...

I am not accusing parpol of being a pedophile or anything. I am just saying that if I specifically pick and choose what facts and statistics I want to talk about then it totally is guaranteed and anyone who disagrees is a corporate bootlicker.

Hey, that is fun.

This is such a ridiculous argument when your argument essentially is shilling for a company and trying to downplay how suspicious this whole thing is. By easily refutable you must mean “maybe a meteor killed both” levels of stars aligning.

No. I am not trying to downplay things. I am doing the opposite. I want people to focus on the actual safety issues and design issues. Not to fantasize over what T Swizzy Wizzle will say on the podcast about this in a few months.

Also, real talk? Just because someone doesn't support you in every single way does not mean they are "shilling for a company"

Assassinations are not a rare occurrence, but you’re making it sound like fairy tale material.

... Yes. Yes assassinations are actually a very rare occurrence. Quick google says the murder rate in the US in 2022 was 5-6 murders per 100,000 people. If we assume all of those are assassinations (and not just kids dying in "gang violence" in a preschool). Same google says 14.5 suicides per 100,000 people.

Hmmm. So a bit under 3x. And, switching to chatgpt because I can't be bothered to math across the different demographics, we get 100-150 deaths per 100,000 men aged 18 to 50 from medical complications.

Gasp!

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You don’t compare the stats to the population in its entirety

You do for disease and suicide as it can happen to literally anyone.

If working for a specific company or being a whistleblower affects those statistics, the company should be held responsible anyway.

sadfsdfasfasf

From what is currently known about the two whistleblowers neither were particularly at higher risk of suicide or MRSA. The person who died of MRSA was healthy and active with no history of hospitalization whatsoever. Close friends of the first whistleblower claim that suicide was very unlike him, and his previous statement of "if anything happens, it wasn't suicide" strengthens that.

There are other commenters here speculating that being a whistleblower makes you at higher risk of suicide, but there are no official statistics on that, so it is at most speculation, therefore I need to use general statistics.

All probabilistic models and datasets eventually get replaced with more accurate ones, but that doesn't discredit them until then.

How is your take also not a conspiracy theory? You just pinned it on the little guy instead of a megacorp

Well, for one thing, the definition of "conspiracy" is "a secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act". So... you can't have a one person conspiracy.

Ah yes, technicalities, the best of defenses

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