Connexions

You are here: Home » Content » Gray Matters for the Hughes Aircraft Case
Content Actions
Lenses

What is a lens?

Lenses

A lens is a custom view of Connexions content. You can think of it as a fancy kind of list that will let you see Connexions through the eyes of organizations and people you trust.

What is in a lens?

Lens makers point to Connexions materials (modules and collections), creating a guide that includes their own comments and descriptive tags about the content.

Who can create a lens?

Any individual Connexions member, a community, or a respected organization.

This content is ...
Affiliated with (?)
This content is either by members of the organizations listed or about topics related to the organizations listed. Click each link to see a list of all content affiliated with the organization.

  • This module is included inLens: Collaborative Development of Ethics Across the Curriculum Resources and Sharing of Best Practices
    By: University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez - College of Business AdministrationAs a part of collection:"Corporate Governance"

    Comments:

    "This course is developed around the four AACSB ethics themes. The acronym AACSB stands for the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business which accredits business programs internationally."

    Click the "EAC Toolkit" link to see all content affiliated with them.

    EAC Toolkit
Tags

(?)

These tags come from the endorsement, affiliation, and other lenses that include this content.

Gray Matters for the Hughes Aircraft Case

Module by: William Frey

Summary: The Hughes case has been extensively researched by Chuck Huff from St. Olaf College with the results published at www.computingcases.org. It will also be one of 10 cases to be included in a textbook on computer ethics entitled, Good Computing: A Virtue Approach to Computer Ethics under contract with Jones & Bartlett with Chuck Huff, William Frey, and Jose Cruz as authors. This module takes three decision points from the case and has students evaluate these using three ethics tests (reversibility, harm/beneficence, and publicity) and a feasibility test. This module is designed to give students experience integrating ethical considerations into real world decision making. This module is being developed as a part of an NSF-funded project, "Collaborative Development of Ethics Across the Curriculum Resources and Sharing of Best Practices," NSF SES 0551779.

Introduction

I. Introduction The Hughes Aircraft Case involves a group of employees in charge of testing chips for weapons systems. Because of the lengthy testing procedure required by the U.S. Defense Department, Hughes soon fell behind schedule in delivering chips to customers. To get chips out faster, some Hughes middle level managers began to put pressure on employees to pass chips that had failed tests or to pass them without testing. The scenarios below consist of narratives that stop at the point of decision. Your job is to complete the narrative by making a decision. Alternatives are provided to get the process started, but you may find it necessary to design your own solution. Ethics and feasibility tests help you to evaluate these alternatives and even design new ones more to your liking. This format superficially resembles the Gray Matters exercise used at Boeing Corporation. (More information on the history of Gray Matters can be found by consulting Carolyn Whitbeck, Ethics in Engineering Practice, 1998, 176-182.) This version differs in being more open-ended and more oriented toward giving you the opportunity to practice using ethical theory (which has been encapsulated into ethics tests).

Directions

    II. Directions
  • Read the following scenarios and the accompanying solutions
  • Evaluate the alternatives in terms of the tests described below.
  • Choose the one you think best or design your own solution if you believe you can do better.
  • Summarize your results by filling in the solution evaluation matrix that appears on the page following the scenario. Notice that the first column repeats the solution alternatives.
  • Be prepared to present your matrix to the class. You will also provide the other groups in the class with a copy of your matrix for their ethics portfolios
Scenario One: Responding to Organizational Pressure Frank Saia has worked at Hughes Aircraft for a long time. Now he is faced with the most difficult decisions of his career. He has been having problems in the environmental testing phase of his microchip manufacturing plant; the detailed nature of these tests has caused Hughes to be consistently late in delivering the chips to customers. Because of the time pressure to deliver chips, Saia has been working to make the production of chips more efficient without losing the quality of the product. Chips are manufactured and then tested, and this provides two places where the process can bottle up. Even though you might have a perfectly fine chip on the floor of the plant, it cannot be shipped without testing. And, since there are several thousand other chips waiting to be tested, it can sit in line for a long time. Saia has devised a method that allows testers to put the important chips, the “hot parts,” ahead of the others without disrupting the flow and without losing the chips in the shuffle. He has also added a “gross leak” test that quickly tells if a chip in a sealed container is actually sealed or not. Adding this test early in the testing sequence allows environmental testing to avoid wasting time by quickly eliminating chips that would fail a more fine-grained leak test later in the sequence. Because environmental testing is still falling behind, Saia’s supervisors and Hughes customers are getting angry and have begun to apply pressure. Karl Reismueller, the director of the Division of Microelectronics at Hughes, has given Saia’s telephone number to several customers, whose own production lines were shut down awaiting the parts that Saia has had trouble delivering. His customers are now calling him directly to say “we’re dying out here” for need of parts. Frank Saia has discovered that an employee under his supervision, Donald LaRue, has been skipping tests on the computer chips. Since LaRue began this practice, they have certainly been more on time in their shipments. Besides, both LaRue and Saia know that many of the “hot” parts are actually for systems in the testing phase, rather than for ones that will be put into active use. So testing the chips for long-term durability that go into these systems seems unnecessary. Still, LaRue was caught by Quality Control skipping a test, and now Saia needs to make a decision. Upper management has provided no guidance; they simply told him to “handle it” and to keep the parts on time. He can’t let LaRue continue skipping tests, or at least he shouldn’t let this skipping go unsupervised. LaRue is a good employee, but he doesn’t have the science background to know which tests would do the least damage if they were skipped. He could work with LaRue and help him figure out the best tests to skip so the least harm is done. But getting directly involved in skipping the tests would mean violating company policy and federal law.
    Alternatives
  1. Do nothing. LaRue has started skipping tests on his own initiative. If any problems arise, then LaRue will have to take responsibility, not Saia, because LaRue was acting independently of and even against Saia’s orders.
  2. Call LaRue in and tell him to stop skipping tests immediately. Then call the customers and explain that the parts cannot be shipped until the tests are carried out.
  3. Consult with LaRue and identify non essential chips or chips that will not be used in systems critical to safety. Skipping tests on these chips will do the least damage.
  4. Your solution….
Scenario Two: Responding to Wrongdoing Margaret Gooderal works in a supervisory position in the environmental testing group at Hughes Aircraft. Her supervisor, Donald LaRue, is also the current supervisor for environmental testing. The group that LaRue and Gooderal together oversee test the chips that Hughes makes in order to determine that they would survive under the drastic environmental conditions they will likely face. Rigorous testing of the chips is the ideal, but some chips (the hot chips) get in line ahead of others. Gooderal has found out that over the last several months, many of these tests are being skipped. The reason: Hughes has fallen behind in the production schedule and Hughes upper management and Hughes customers have been applying pressure to get chip production and testing back on schedule. Moreover, LaRue and others feel that skipping certain tests doesn’t matter, since many of these chips are being used in systems that are in the testing phase, rather than ones that will be put into active use. A few months after Margaret Gooderal started her new position, she was presented with a difficult problem. One of the “girls” (the women and men in Environmental Testing at Hughes), Lisa Lightner, came to her desk crying. She was in tears and trembling because Donald LaRue had forcefully insisted that she pass a chip that she was sure had failed the test she was running. Lightner ran the hermeticity test on the chips. The chips are enclosed in a metal container, and one of the questions is whether the seal to that container leaks. From her test, she is sure that the chip is a “leaker”—the seal is not airtight so that water and corrosion will seep in over time and damage the chip. She has come to Gooderal for advice. Should she do what LaRue wants and pass a chip she knows is a leaker?
    Alternatives
  1. Gooderal should advise Lightner to go along with LaRue. He is her supervisor. If he orders to pass the chip, then she should do so.
  2. Gooderal should go to Human Resources with Lightner and file a harassment complaint against LaRue. Skipping tests is clearly illegal and ordering an employee to commit an illegal act is harassment.
  3. Gooderal and Lightner should blow the whistle. They should go to the U.S. defense department and inform them of the fact that Hughes Aircraft is delivering chips that have either failed tests or have not been tested.
  4. Your solution….
Scenario 3: Goodearl, Ibarra, and the AMRAAM Incident Now that Goodearl had few sympathizers among upper management, she increasingly turned to Ruth Ibarra in Quality assurance for support in her concerns about test skipping and the falsification of paperwork. One day, Goodearl noticed that some AMRAAM chips with leak stickers were left on her project desk in the environmental testing area. The leak stickers meant that the seal on the chips' supposedly airtight enclosure had failed a test to see if they leaked. AMRAAM meant that the chips were destined to be a part of an Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile. Goodearl knew that these parts could not be retested and needed to be simply thrown away. So why was someone keeping them? She also knew that these were officially "hot parts" and that the company was behind schedule in shipping these parts. After consulting with Ruth Ibarra, the two of them decided to do some sleuthing. They took the chips and their lot travelers to a photocopy machine and made copies of the travelers with "failed" noted on the leak test. They then replaced the chips and their travelers on the desk. Later that day, as Don LaRue passed the desk, Goodearl asked Don LaRue if he knew anything about the chips. "None of your business," he replied. The chips disappeared, and later the travelers showed up in company files with the "failed" altered to "passed." So, Goodearl and Ibarra had clear evidence (in their photocopy of the "failed" on the traveler) that someone was passing off failed chips to their customers. And these were important chips, part of the guidance system of an air-to-air missile.
    Alternatives: Since they have clear evidence, Gooderal and Ibarra should blow the whistle. Evaluate each of the following ways in which they could blow the whistle
  1. Blow the whistle to Hughes’ Board of Directors. In this way they can stop the test skipping but will also be able to keep the whole affair “in house.”
  2. Blow the whistle to the local news media. In this way they will shame Hughes into compliance with the testing requirements.
  3. Take the evidence to the U.S. Department of Defense, since they are the client and are being negatively impacted by Hughes’ illegal actions.
  4. Some other mode of blowing the whistle….
Solution Evaluation Matrix
Alternatives/Tests Reversibility/Rights Test Harm/Benefits Test Virtue/Value Test (Also Publicity) Global Feasibility Test (Implementation Obstacles)
Alternative One (Worst Alternative) Evaluate Alt 1 using reversibility/rights test      
Alternative Two (Best among those given)   Weigh harms against benefits for alt 2    
Alternative Three     What values/disvalues are realized in alt 3?  
Your Solution       What obstacles could hinder implementation of solution?

Ethics Tests: Set Up and Pitfalls

    III. Solution Evaluation Tests
  • REVERSIBILITY: Would I think this is a good choice if I were among those affected by it?
  • PUBILICITY: Would I want to be publicly associated with this action through, say, its publication in the newspaper?
  • HARM/BENEFICENCE: Does this action do less harm than any of the available alternatives?
  • FEASIBILITY: Can this solution be implemented given time, technical, economic, legal, and political constraints?
    Harm Test Set-Up
  • Identify the agent (=the person who will perform the action). Describe the action (=what the agent is about to do).
  • Identify the stakeholders (individuals who have a vital interest at risk) and their stakes.
  • Identify, sort out, and weight the expected results or consequences.
    Harm Test Pitfalls
  • Paralysis of Action--considering too many consequences.
  • Incomplete analysis--considering too few results.
  • Failure to weigh harms against benefits.
  • Failure to compare different alternatives.
  • Justice failures--ignoring the fairness of the distribution of harms and benefits.
    Reversibility Test Set-Up
  • Identify the agent
  • Describe the action
  • Identify the stakeholders and their stakes
  • Use the stakeholder analysis to select the relations to be reversed.
  • Reverse roles between the agent (you) and each stakeholder: put them in your place (as the agent) and yourself in their place (as the target of the action
  • If you were in their place, would you still find the action acceptable?
    Reversibility Pitfalls
  • Leaving out a key stakeholder relation.
  • Failing to recognize and address conflicts between stakeholders and their conflicting stakes.
  • Confusing treating others with respect with capitulating to their demands (Reversing with Hitler).
  • Failing to reach closure, i.e., an overall global reversal assessment that takes into account all the stakeholders the agent has reversed with.
    Public Identification Set-Up
  • Set up the analysis by identifying the agent, describing the action under consideration, and listing the key values or virtues at play in the situation.
  • Associate the action with the agent.
  • Identify what the action says about the agent as a person. Does it reveal him or her as someone associated with a virtue/value or a vice?
    Public Identification Pitfalls
  1. Action is not associated with the agent. The most common pitfall is failure to associate the agent and the action. The action may have bad consequences and it may treat individuals with disrespect but these points are not as important in the context of this test as what they imply about the agent as a person who deliberately performs such an action.
  2. Failure to specify the moral quality, virtue, or value of the action that is imputed to the agent in the test. To say, for example, that willfully harming the public is bad fails to zero in on precisely what moral quality this attributes to the agent. Does it render him or her unjust, irresponsible, corrupt, dishonest, or unreasonable?
Gray Matters in Hughes Exercises
Media File: GM_Hughes_V2.doc
Figure 1: These exercises present three decision points from Hughes, solution alternatives, summaries of ethics and feasibility tests, and a solution evaluation matrix. Carry out the exercise by filling in the solution evaluation matrix.
This timeline is taken from the Computing Cases website developed and maintained by Dr. Charles Huff at St. Olaf College. Computing Cases is funded by the National Science Foundation, NSF DUE-9972280 and DUE 9980768.

Time Line
1979 Ruth Ibarra beginsworking for Hughes Aircraft company's Microelectronic Circuit Division (Hughes MCD) in Newport Beach, CA
1981 Margaret Gooderal begins working for Hughes MCD as a supervisor for assembly on the hybrid production floor and as a supervisor in the hybrid engineering lab
1984 Ibarra becomes supervisor for hybrid quality assurance
1985 Goodearl asks Ibarra to look at errors in paperwork, Ibarra brings errors to the attention of her supervisors and was told to keep quiet. This begins time period where Goodearl/Ibarra become aware of problems in hybrid chip testing and paperwork.
1986 Goodearl becomes supervisor for seals processing in the environmental testing area.
1986 Faise Claims Act (31 U.S. C 3729-3733) becomes False Claims Reform Act of 1986 making it stronger and easier to apply.
Oct. 1986 Goodearl/Ibarra report problems ot Hughes management, and, after the problems were not fixed, Goodearl/Ibarra reported the allegations of faulty testing to the United States Department of Defense.
Jan 9, 1987 Earliest date that Hughes may have stopped neglecting environmental screening tests.
1988 Ibarra leaves Hughes feeling that her job had been stripped of all real responsibility.
March 1989 Goodearl is laid off from Hughes.
1995 Goodearl and her husband are divorced.
Civil Suit Timeline
1990-1996 United States of America, ex rel. Taxpayers Against Fraud, Ruth Aldred (was Ibarra), and Margaret Goodearl v. Hughes Aircraft Company, Inc.
1990 Goodearl files wrongful discharge suit against Hughes and a number of individual managers, which was eventually dropped in favor of the civil suit.
May 29, 1990 Thinking the government investigation was taking too much time, Goodearl/Aldred file civil suit against Hughes under False Claims Reform Act of 1986 with the help of Taxpayers Against Fraud and Washington law firm Phillips and Cohen.
December 1992 Under provisions of the FCA, the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Division takes over the civil case.
Sep. 10, 1996 Hughes found guilty in civil trial. Pays U.S. Government 4,050,00 dollars and each relator 891,000 dollars plus a separate payment of 450,000 dollars to cover attorney's fees, costs, and expenses.
Criminal Suit Timeline
1991-1993 United States of America v. Hughes Aircraft Co., and Donald LaRue
December 13, 1991 After a lengthy investigation, the U.S. Department of Defense charges Hughes and Donald A. LaRue with a 51-count indictment accusing it of falsifying tests of microelectronic circuits (criminal suit).
June 15, 1992 Hughes found guilty of conspiring to defraud the U.S. Government in crminal case, co-defendent LaRUE acquitted following 4-week trial. Goodearl/Aldred called as witnesses in trial. Hughes appeals.
Oct. 29, 1992 Hughes fined 3.5 million in criminal trial decision.
December 2, 1993 Appellate court upholds 1992 criminal conviction and sentence. Hughes appeals.
Hughes Socio Technical System
  Hardware/Software Physical Surroundings People, Roles, Structures Procedures Laws and Regulations Data and Data Structures
Description Hybrid Chips (circuitry hermetically sealed in metal or ceramic packages in inert gas atmosphere Battle conditions under which chips might be used Hughes Microelectric Circuit Division Chip Testing: Temperature Cycle, Constant Acceleration, Mechanical Shock, Hermeticity (Fine and Gross Leak), P.I.N.D. Legally Mandated Tests Lot Travelors to document chips
  Analogue to Digital Conversion Chips E-1000 at Hughes (Clean Room) Department of Defense (Office of Inspector General) Hughes Human Resources Procedures for Complaints Whistle Blower Protection Legislation  
  Radar and Missile Guidance Systems   Hughes Quality Control Dissenting Professional Opinions Qui Tam Lawsuit, Civil Suit, Criminal Suit  
      Individuals: Reismueller, Temple, Saia, LaRue, Goodearl, Ibarra/Aldren      

Blowing the Whistle

    Ethical Dissent
  1. Establish a clear technical foundation.
  2. Keep your arguments on a high professional plane, as impersonal and objective as possible, avoiding extraneous issues and emotional outbursts.
  3. Try to catch problems early, and keep the argument at the lowest managerial level possible.
  4. Before going out on a limb, make sure that the issue is sufficiently important.
  5. Use (and help estabish) organizational dispute resolution mechanisms.
  6. Keep records and collect paper.
  7. These items are taken from the IEEE website, link above.
    Before Going Public
  1. Make sure of your motivation.
  2. Count your costs.
  3. Obtain all the necessary background materials and evidence.
  4. Organize to protect your own interests.
  5. Choose the right avenue for your disclosure.
  6. Make your disclosure in the right spirit.
  7. These items come from the IEEE (see onlineethics link) and from the manuscript of Good Computing by Chuck Huff, William Frey, and Jose Cruz.
    Places to Go
  1. Government Agencies
  2. Judicial Systems
  3. Legislators
  4. Advocacy Groups
  5. News Media
  6. In Puerto Rico, laws 14 and 426 have been passed to protect those who would blow the whistle on government corruption. The Oficina de Etica Gubernamental de Puerto Rico has a whistle blower's hotline. See link above.
    When to Blow the Whistle.
  1. Serious and Considerable Harm
  2. Notification of immediate supervisor.
  3. Exhaustion of internal channels of communication/appeal.
  4. Documented Evidence.
  5. Likelihood of successful resolution.
    References
  1. Richard T. De George, "Ethical Responsibilities of Engineers in Large Organizations: The Pinto Case," in Ethical Issues in Engineering, ed. Deborah G. Johnson (1991) New Jersey: Prentice-Hall: 175-186.
  2. Carolyn Whitbeck (1998) Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research. U.K. Cambridge University Press: 55-72 and 176-181.
  3. Charles Harris, Michael Pritchard and Michael Rabins (2005) Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases, 3rd Ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth: 203-206.

Comments, questions, feedback, criticisms?

Send feedback