Monday's aviation news came with a free grammar lesson. CNN's headline: "Seats on hundreds of Boeing 737 MAX jets were incorrectly installed, FAA says." Read it twice. Now try to answer one small question: installed by whom? * The one-sentence version of the actual news: the FAA proposed a directive covering 453 US-registered 737 MAXs after getting a report that passenger seat assemblies "were not correctly installed in the seat tracks" — meaning in an emergency landing, the seats could come loose and hurt the people sitting in them. * Back to the missing person. CNN's headline doesn't name an installer. Reuters went with "FAA says seats on hundreds of Boeing 737 MAX were incorrectly installed" — same construction, same vacancy. Even the FAA's own sentence is passive. Somewhere in this story there is a human being with a torque wrench, and every layer of it has agreed not to look for them. * Notice that Boeing IS in every headline — as an adjective. "Boeing 737 MAX jets," the way you'd say "Toyota parking lot." The brand shows up to identify the furniture; it just never has to conjugate a verb. After the decade this plane has had — two crashes, a door plug that got off mid-flight without using the stairs — newsrooms have gotten very good at writing around the question of who does things at Boeing. * And the scale deserves a subject. Up to 69 seat assemblies per jet, across 453 jets — as many as 31,000 seats, each needing an estimated hour of labor to fix. One crooked seat is an oops. Thirty-one thousand is a process, and processes have owners. * To be fair to the reporters: the FAA's proposal doesn't name the installer either, and you can't print a name you don't have — maybe it's the factory line, maybe a supplier, maybe somebody's retrofit. But there's an honest sentence for that: "and nobody's saying who did it." That sentence has teeth. "Were incorrectly installed" is the same information with the teeth filed down. * We've flagged this move before when the subject was a police shooting — "shots were fired," by nobody, at no one. Turns out the passive voice is aviation-grade: load-tested, fire-resistant, and always available when someone needs to not be in the sentence.