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

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.

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?

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.

Ethics Tests: Set Up and Pitfalls

Blowing the Whistle