Another reason why H-1B visas need to go away – they kill people

The Boeing 737 Max has been involved in at least two fatal crashes. Turns out one of the reasons why may be that Boeing decided to employ $9 an hour contractors to create critical software instead of doing it in-house.

The software for the Max was created as Boeing was making a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors. One of the key companies involved was HCL Technologies Ltd, located across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, where aircraft are built. Even as the software was being created, the shoddy nature of its design was obvious. Code was routinely rejected because it had not been written properly.

Per Business Standard, in posts on social media, HCL engineers stated they helped develop and test the Max’s flight-display software, while employees from another Indian company, Cyient Ltd., handled software for flight-test equipment.

“Boeing was doing all kinds of things, everything you can imagine, to reduce cost, including moving work from Puget Sound, because we’d become very expensive here,” said Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer laid off in 2017. “All that’s very understandable if you think of it from a business perspective. Slowly over time, it appears that’s eroded the ability for Puget Sound designers to design.”

-Business Standard

HCL, once known as Hindustan Computers, was founded in 1976 by billionaire Shiv Nadar and now has more than $8.6 billion in annual sales. It has 18,000 employees in the United States. A very large proportion of these workers are H-1B visa holders.

HCL is the same company that became infamous when Disney forced its workers to train their replacements, who were employed through the H-1B visa program and supplied to Disney by HCL. HCL was subsequently sued under the False Claims Act for the firm’s alleged “egregious and widespread fraud against the United States in applying for and securing visas.” A document made public as part of the suit alleged rampant wage theft by HCL. HCL reportedly pays its H-1B workers less than the statutory minimum. That is a deliberate corporate strategy. It is, in fact, the entire business model of HCL.

In the two crashes involving the Boeing 737, the system most directly implicated was the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). A single sensor failed and caused automatic systems on the plane to put the aircraft into a dive and ultimately crash. The crew tried to react, but they did not understand what was happening and ultimately failed.

Why didn’t the crew have an accurate picture of what was happening with the plane?

The flight display software that should have alerted the crew to the problem malfunctioned. That was a software installation problem, not a hardware issue. The flight display software was delivered and installed with a design flaw. It was “broken” when it was put in.

Who created that software? HCL Technologies – the guys hiring $9 an hour Indians to take jobs away from Americans.

Let’s be clear. When a sensor failed on the plane and put the plane into a dive, the pilots should have seen a message on their display in the cockpit telling them that a second sensor on the plane disagreed with the faulty reading and alerting them immediately to the fact that something was wrong and that one of those sensors had obviously failed. This feature is called the AOA Disagree Alert. It tells pilots in the first seconds of an emergency that they need to question the data the plane is feeding them, because not all the sensors on the plane agree. It focuses the crew on the real issue and gives them time to react.

No such warning message was shown, because the software running the display software was faulty. It was delivered that way. Had the software worked as it was intended to work, in fact, maintenance crews would likely have caught the problem with the sensor before the plane ever left the ground. A whole bunch of people would still be alive today who died horribly.

“Under normal circumstances, this [faulty AOA sensor] would have been flagged immediately by an AOA DISAGREE alert. … At no time did any of the flight crew receive a clear message that the AOA data was unreliable. The fact that the left-side AOA sensor and the right-side AOA sensor did not match should have triggered an AOA DISAGREE alert. … The pilots never saw the one message that would have told them clearly: one of your AOA sensors is bad.”

-Sylvia Wrigley, experienced pilot, flight instructor, and aviation safety analyst (Fear of Landing blog, in-depth technical analysis of Lion Air Flight 610, April 2020).

At the time of the two crashes involving 737 MAX planes, because of the software issue in question, 80% of these planes flying worldwide had the same problem.

We already had a bunch of reasons to do away with H-1B visas. Now we have another one. They kill people.