
Boeing's Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster - johnny313
https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution
======
ineedasername
_> Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same.
Nobody. Is. Different. [from a wall street analyst about Boeing]_

This in a nutshell represents the core failure of modern managerial thinking.
What started as "scientific management" many decades ago, an attempt to
systematically understand how corporations should operate, quickly evolved
into a group think belief that management could function as fungible &
completely replaceable units of work-- that a "manager" could be trained up in
various basic principles and plugged into any role

There are of course commonalities across businesses, and commonalities across
managers for necessary skill, but each business is, in some core, fundamental
way, _different_ from others. Good management of a company doesn't following a
paint-by-numbers rule book, it requires deep understanding of the particulars
of _that_ business, the market & industry it operates in.

I think this is changing, slowly, but the legacy of this flawed thinking is a
long one.

~~~
bjornsing
Yea, this whole “management is a profession in itself” thing is incredibly
toxic on so many levels... If you’re American you should count yourself lucky
that this thinking has not swallowed the whole economy. Where I am (in Sweden)
it pretty much has. :(

~~~
ChuckNorris89
It's the same, or maybe even worse in Germany.

On a previous job I was working on a component for the project that was a well
known Audi model. In 18 months, Audi replaced the manager for that project 3
times.

Managerial careers in German corps are a revolving door where incompetents go
in, do nothing, slap the prestigious company name in their resume, then, when
the shit hits the fan, jump ship to next prestigious company. Rinse and
repeat.

------
fallous
Early in my career when I encountered outsourcing initiatives I perceived them
as management choosing cost over quality. A couple of decades later my view
has changed on that mostly thanks to having worked more directly within the
management structure of numerous companies (ranging from startup to ConglomCo
Megasized).

In most cases those making the decision really believe they can achieve
comparable results by outsourcing while also taking advantage of global wage
differences and also converting the continual overhead of personnel into just-
in-time overhead that only has to be taken on as needed. This is not unlike
the devops trend towards using cloud-based infrastructure.

The problem is that the thinking that you achieve comparable results by
outsourcing is woefully naive. In-house teams have a vested interest in
understanding the business problems as well as filling in the communications
gap between what is asked for vs what is actually desired as an outcome.
Outsourced contracted labor does not share those same interests. Additionally,
when you outsource technical labor you MUST have the ability internally to
create very good designs, specifications, and oversight/feedback mechanisms to
ensure that you're getting what you wanted rather than what you asked for via
sloppy communication. For those companies that have previously had internal
teams and decide to transition to external resources they almost never have
someone with that ability and in fact are unaware of the impedance mismatch
between their asks and the results delivered by internal teams.

Outsourcing means trading the overhead of personnel costs for the overhead of
a much more complex and difficult communications burden. It is extraordinarily
rare that the company that opts to transition from internal to outsourced
talent has the capability or even awareness of that trade, resulting in
predictably poor results.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
Even if designs are done in house for outsourced production, it's stealing a
great resource away from the designers: feedback.

They never see the process it takes to be created, the communication pipeline
between the designer and builder is throttled, their designs are only tweaked
when large or obvious flaws are found.

~~~
akitzmiller
This is a wonderful comment. I think someone on this site said that coding is
the process of understanding the solution. This is what that means.

------
ssivark
Couldn't resist posting this excerpt:

\---

 _And while Boeing’s engineers toiled to get McDonnell’s lemon planes into the
sky, their own hopes of designing a new plane to compete with Airbus, Boeing’s
only global market rival, were shriveling. Under the sway of all the naysayers
who had called out the folly of the McDonnell deal, the board had adopted a
hard-line “never again” posture toward ambitious new planes. Boeing’s leaders
began crying “crocodile tears,” Sorscher claimed, about the development costs
of 1995’s 777, even though some industry insiders estimate that it became the
most profitable plane of all time. The premise behind this complaining was
silly, Sorscher contended in PowerPoint presentations and a Harvard Business
School-style case study on the topic. A return to the “problem-solving”
culture and managerial structure of yore, he explained over and over again to
anyone who would listen, was the only sensible way to generate shareholder
value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much
more than an eye roll. “I’m not buying it,” was a common response.
Occasionally, though, someone in the audience was outright mean, like the Wall
Street analyst who cut him off mid-sentence:_

 _“Look, I get it. What you’re telling me is that your business is different.
That you’re special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different,
because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different.”_

 _And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane
manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or
make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent,
bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse._

~~~
ptmcc
The 777 program is a case study in program management and engineering
excellence, and that aircraft is still an amazing piece of quality design and
engineering.

It is so sad that the Boeing of those days is dead and buried. Everything
since the MD takeover ("merger") has been a race to the bottom.

~~~
teachrdan
Might there be a literal case study of the 777? I read a book about the
development of the 747 and it was absolutely fascinating--particularly the
(now extinct?) Boeing obsession with engineering safety.

[0] Jumbo: The Making of the Boeing 747

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22849121-jumbo](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22849121-jumbo)

~~~
mannykannot
As you liked that, consider "Twenty-First-Century Jet: The Making and
Marketing of the Boeing 777" by Karl Sabbagh. I believe there is also a video
series from PBS. The 777 development program might have been Boeing's
technical apotheosis.

~~~
sgnelson
The PBS documentary is linked in the above article:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oyWZjdXxlw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oyWZjdXxlw)

with this quote:

"There is a scene in the first episode of a five-part 1996 PBS series on the
making of the 777, Boeing’s first plane to employ “fly-by-wire” technology, in
which an engineer discusses the company’s philosophy of computer-assisted
aviation:

One of the things that we do in the basic design is the pilot always has the
ultimate authority of control. There’s no computer on the airplane that he
cannot override, or turn off if the ultimate comes, but, in terms of any of
our features, even those that are built to prevent the airplane from stalling,
which is the lowest speed you can fly and beyond which you would lose the
control. We don’t inhibit that totally; we make it difficult, but if something
in the box should inappropriately think that it’s stalling when it isn’t, the
pilot can say, this is wrong and he can override it. That’s a fundamental
difference in philosophy that we have versus some of the competition.

------
jgeada
You often hear about required ethics courses for engineers, but it strikes me
that it is management that most requires this. The whole MBA thing & the
implied notion of managerialism has been a straight up disaster to everything
it has touched (other than, of course, the enriching of the 0.1%)

~~~
Traster
I would argue that the mba program is basically irrelevant. The problem is
that the incentive structures for management in these companies is
overwhelmingly to produce short term gains in order to secure promotion and
bonuses, since the metric of success is to _not_ stay in your role very long.

The ideal situation for a manager is to be promoted through/across the company
every few years. Long enough to deliver some large project (that was certainly
already in the pipeline) but short enough not to be responsible for the long
term impact of that project.

You don't fix that by giving the management lectures on morality, you fix it
by reducing their ability to hide the issues that happens in their
organisation so that when lines are crossed the manager can't be confident
they can sweep it under the rug.

~~~
remarkEon
>I would argue that the mba program is basically irrelevant.

It is definitely relevant. The programs will pump students full of notions of
"corporate social responsibility", right before they send them off to
consulting gigs for the summer where short-termism _is how you get the offer_.
It's a self reinforcing system. It would maybe be different if MBA programs
weren't a cash cow for universities (especially universities that cater to
international students), and instead were essentially apprenticeships at the
companies themselves. I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, but
I'm not ready to forgive the MBA programs' part in this.

------
mannykannot
Also worth noting is the House Aviation Subcommittee's take on the problem:

 _The panel’s majority members were best embodied by subcommittee Chairman
Rick Larsen, an ex-lobbyist New Democrat who delivered an opening statement of
head-scratching insipidness: “As I have said before, if the public does not
feel safe about flying then they won’t fly; if they don’t fly, airlines don’t
need to buy airplanes; if they don’t need to buy airplanes, then airplanes
don’t need to be built; and if there is no need to build airplanes, then there
will be no jobs in aviation.”_

Followed by Congressman Paul Mitchell's lambasting of Captain Dan Carey, the
outgoing president of the Allied Pilots Association, for having the temerity
to go public with his concerns: _" What’s the value [of releasing a secret
recording] to the system or the families?... Explain to me what warranted
that, sir!"_ Clearly, the problem here is that the travelling public, and
victims' families, have come to learn about MCAS and its role in recent
crashes.

When you are trying to spin a story, however, it can be difficult to keep it
straight. Here's Sam Graves, ranking Republican on the House Transportation
and Infrastructure Committee:

 _“It’s not the plane I’m concerned about; I think the plane is very safe. We
need to concentrate on the pilot ... being trained [for] the aircraft, and
being able to fly a plane and not just fly the computer.”_

His blame-the-pilots rhetoric does not look so good for Boeing now that we are
learning the lengths it went to in order to avoid there being any additional
training for pilots.

~~~
wbl
Quick the nose is pitching down and you didn't command it. What do you do?
Flip the trim cutouts. True before MCAS true after.

~~~
mannykannot
Firstly, on previous variants, opposing the trim runaway with the yoke was
sufficient to cut out the electric trim, but this was necessarily changed for
MCAS-commanded trim changes. It is conceivable that a trim runaway might not
be stopped by that action, but it is apparently highly unlikely -- such
situations are apparently not part of current 737 simulator training [1].

This is significant, because stopping a runaway by opposing it with the yoke
leaves the airplane close to being in trim, and toggling the cutout switches
becomes a clean-up operation to prevent a recurrence. This, apparently, is as
far as pilot simulator training for trim runaway goes. In the case of MCAS,
however, toggling the swiches is the only way to stop it, and it leaves the
airplane significantly out of trim.

This is what the Ethiopian Airlines flight crew did, but then they found it
impossible to put the airplane back in trim because the load on the stabilizer
jackscrew was resisting their attempts at manual trimming. This problem is
mentioned in the documentation (though not, significantly, in the checkist
that the FAA's response to the Lion Air crash directed pilots' attention to),
but in that documentation, it rather vaguely says this might be a problem, and
if so, it might be necessary to pitch the airplane further in the direction of
the mis-trim to reduce the load on the jackscrew so that it can be cranked in
manually. It suggests that several cycles may be necessary to complete the
action.

If you are, as the Ethiopian Airlines crew were, at low alttude in an airplane
mis-trimmed to dive, this is not a viable option, which is why they re-engaged
the electric trim in the hope of correcting the problem. The article mentions
a video, that was briefly available, of an exercise to test this scenario, in
which the professional pilots struggled to maintain control.

It is clear from this that MCAS runaway is sufficiently different from the
sort of trim runaways that pilots have previously experienced, either for real
or in their simulator training, and this alone should arguably have been
sufficient reason for additional training to prepare for MCAS failure. Even
after the Lion Air crash, the response of Boeing and the FAA failed to make
this distinction clear -- the message was 'this is merely a form of trim
runaway, just like what you have trained for', which it is not.

And then there is the separate issue of not using both AofA inputs, apparently
just to keep the lie that there was nothing about MCAS that pilots needed to
know about.

None of the above is my own opinion - they are issues that professional
pilots, engineers and safety experts have forcefully raised. Captain Dan Carey
himself initially went along with Boeing's take on the issue, until more
information about the issue came out. If you have contrary experience of 737
training and operation, your point of view would be most welcome.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvpAsiwdM_E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvpAsiwdM_E)

------
petermcneeley
Probably the most interesting and relevant part to HN

> It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and
> indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads
> of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of
> Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more
> than half its employees

~~~
dchichkov
Link to the original article:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-
software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers)

"Boeing said the company did not rely on engineers from HCL and Cyient for the
Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which has been linked to the
Lion Air crash last October and the Ethiopian Airlines disaster in March. The
Chicago-based planemaker also said it didn’t rely on either firm for another
software issue disclosed after the crashes: a cockpit warning light that
wasn’t working for most buyers."

but training HCL likely was taking tall:

"Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to
Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL’s services at a San
Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June. He said
the company took no up-front payments on the 787 and only started collecting
payments based on sales years later, an “innovative business model” he offered
to extend to others in the industry.

The 787 entered service three years late and billions of dollars over budget
in 2011, in part because of confusion introduced by the outsourcing strategy.
Under Dennis Muilenburg, a longtime Boeing engineer who became chief executive
in 2015, the company has said that it planned to bring more work back in-house
for its newest planes."

------
ilaksh
I think that a lot of times management believes it's only job is to cut
corners. In those cases, maybe it's better not to have managers.

Maybe if engineers were properly incentivized by profit sharing or something,
they could help maximize profits without throwing out everything else like
managers keep urging them to.

~~~
generatorguy
Lawyers and accountants become partners in their firms and are incentivized to
work towards the long term health of the firm so younger lawyers will buy in
and they can retire and continue to enjoy the profits of the firm.

What do Civil, mechanical, electrical, non-software Engineers have as a career
path? None are in upper management. Maybe you get some stock options? You
certainly don’t get to be in charge unless you start your own small, fledgling
engineering company and then the chances are you only work on small projects
since you aren’t big enough to sue if anything goes wrong you can’t get big
contracts.

Hoping someone can shed some light on another path for career professional
engineers.

~~~
cco
I'm a big fan of the idea of codifying software "engineers" more clearly. When
an architect, civil engineer, or doctor put their stamp on a job they are both
civilally and in some cases criminally liable for that work. As such each
profession has a professional society and legal framework for qualifying their
members.

If you are building a webapp, it's probably fine that you haven't taken an
ethical code, been legally qualified to write the code, etc, but those
"engineers" that write code that keeps airplanes in the air or driverless cars
on the road have, in my opinion, crossed that line into actual engineering
work and as such should hold themselves to the same standards as other
professionals in the space.

In the case of MCAS there would be a codebase with a signed commit by the
responsible engineer, his or her name would be right there in bold when the
first version was shipped and when hack upon hack was piled on. Of course this
is no panacea but this has to be the way forward as software continues to
extend it's reach into mission critical roles in our lives, right?

~~~
zwolbers
In aviation, DERs (Designated Engineering Representatives) fill that role [0].
They are responsible for ensuring rules/regulations are met, and need to sign
off on everything before it's sent to the FAA.

[0]
[https://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/designees_...](https://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/designees_delegations/individual_designees/der/)

~~~
cco
So these software engineers would be referred to as Systems and Equipment
Engineering leads in this case?

~~~
zwolbers
Take this post with a grain of salt - I've never worked directly with a DER.
Hopefully others can correct me where needed.

> So these software engineers would be referred to as Systems and Equipment
> Engineering leads in this case?

I suppose you could say so, however my understanding has always been that DERs
are highly specialized. "Systems and Equipment" covers a wide variety of
aircraft components; I would think that's more of a category than a title. As
a software engineer, on a project level, we've always simply referred to them
as "The DER".

While DERs certainly have a background in engineering, they don't actively
help create the product - I wouldn't classify them as a "Engineering Lead".
When it comes to designing something, its safety is derived from different
internal groups with different goals continuously evaluating each other's
work. At each level, everyone signs off on the work they performed or
reviewed. As I understand it, the DER oversees all of this, and on a technical
level, is ultimately responsible for convincing the FAA everything is safe. On
the software side of things, whenever there's a release, a DER has to sign off
on it.

------
gmoore
I think a much better view of the issue is in the NY Times
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-
crashes.html)

------
malshe
This is a great article and now I am appalled at so many things. But the line
that touched me profoundly is at the end where the father and the husband of 4
victims says this:

“I am empty,” he told the committee. “My life has no meaning.”

I can only imagine the pain he is experiencing.

------
rramadass
Everybody should read David Packard's address to HP Managers in 1960. This was
a time when HP was truly a great company.

[https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-
built-...](https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-our-
company-5634378)

To me, this is what i consider as true "Management" and not the BS that passes
for it today.

------
markhahn
I like to imagine a fantasy United States where the FAA (et al) would have
stepped in, removed all the MBAs, and set the company on a sane course. More
practically, I wonder what could be done to create structural impediments to
the kind of managerial death-cult described in the article. For instance, I
see no reason a company should be allowed to buy its own stock. How about
requiring corporate boards to have at least 51% of non-stockholders? We should
remember that corporations are purely social constructs. There is no natural
law that they must not be interfered with, that only market mechanisms should
control then. We created corporations for social good, and can alter them.

------
dredmorbius
This call-out quote hits very close to home for me:

 _You are in a mature industry that is no longer innovative; it’s a commodity
business. The last great innovation capable of driving major growth in
aviation was the jet engine back in the 1950s, and every technological advance
since has been incremental. And so the emphasis of the business is going to
switch away from engineering and toward supply-chain management. Because every
mature company has to isolate which parts of its business add value, and
delegate the more commoditylike things to the supply chain. The more you look
to the market for pricing signals, the more the role of the engineer will
shrink._

------
jeanl
I am as outraged at Boeing's ineptitude as anybody with a rational mind, but I
can't read this kind of article without cringing. Sentences like "about two
weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane
and all 189 people on it to a horrific death" should raise alarm bells in any
reader's mind. This is probably a writer who knows nothing about aviation
and/or software engineering yet feels very comfortable calling a system
"unthinkably stupid". This smacks of oversimplification and just plain
sloppiness. There are many articles on the entire debacle that are a lot more
measured, and smart about their analysis, including quite a few great reads
that were mentioned here in HN.

~~~
chroem-
I used to work as a controls engineer. Sensor fusion and redundancy is one of
the most basic concepts in controls, and yet it was totally absent from a
system that was responsible for flying the aircraft. There is more redundancy
built into your office building's HVAC system than was built into the 737's
MCAS. That really is inexcusable.

~~~
cmurf
Actually, per the article, the lack of redundancy was central to hiding the
feature from the FAA, keeping it out of the FOM, and ensuring the avoidance of
any scenario that would entail extra pilot training. Whether two or three
sensors, any disagreement among them would have involved a more complex
system, and would risk necessitating an in-cockpit notification of that
disagreement, and the ensuing training so the pilots understand the exact
consequences of the disagreement and a procedure for mitigating it.

And the article explicitly dings Southwest Airlines as having provided Boeing
a financial incentive to avoiding them needing additional simulator training.

~~~
akiselev
_> Whether two or three sensors, any disagreement among them would have
involved a more complex system, and would risk necessitating an in-cockpit
notification of that disagreement, and the ensuing training so the pilots
understand the exact consequences of the disagreement and a procedure for
mitigating it._

The in-cockpit notification light, "AOA Disagree," was a paid upgrade [1].

I don't know what the article is on about.

[1] [https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/boeing-bosses-
una...](https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/boeing-bosses-unaware-
of-737-max-aoa-glitch-before-457943/)

~~~
cmurf
a. The AoA disagree alert is standard, not a paid upgrade.

b. The AoA indicator is a paid upgrade.

c. In most 737 MAX's, the disagree alert did not function correctly (did not
function as they supposedly intended) unless you bought the paid upgrade for
the indicator.

d. Neither the alert nor indicator were considered safety equipment, they were
considered advisory.

e. If the alert indicates a caution or warning, it's going to be listed in the
flight manual, and decently likely a procedure for understanding and handling
that condition must exist, and if so it's going to be a part of a training
regimen, the very thing airlines wanted to avoid.

The two changes already planned: decoupling the disagree alert and angle
indicator. Upon disagreement, MCAS is disabled. That means the disagree alert
is at least cautionary now, because it means the airplane's stall behavior
will be different than other 737s. That absolutely will require simulator
training for pilots.

One of the most central questions is whether the assessment that the disagree
alert was not "safety equipment" was wrong. That MCAS, in an angle of attack
disagree condition, can so quickly induce, entirely on its own, catastrophic
mistrim at low altitude, is rather damning. It suggests the risk assessment
process is flawed.

------
bogomipz
The author states:

>"Southwest always had a lot to say about projected modifications to the 737,
and Kelleher’s team mostly wanted as few technical modifications as possible.
With the MAX, they upped the ante: According to Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing
employee, Boeing agreed to rebate Southwest $1 million for every MAX it
bought, if the FAA required level-D simulator training for the carrier’s
pilots"

This seems like an important part of the story yet I'm not understanding if
it's inclusion is meant to have significance to the tragedies of the 737.
Could someone explain how of if this is germane to the crashes?

~~~
detaro
It's an incentive to make the differences between the planes seem as minimal
as possible and avoid pilots being properly informed about all the details of
the system, leading to pilots not knowing why the plane does what it does and
how to fix it when it goes wrong?

------
cmurf
Dup.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21014714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21014714)

------
sgt101
The moral of this story seems to be "buy Airbus shares".

Maybe Lockheed Martin will buy up Boeing as distressed assets and do something
with it?

------
7532yahoogmail
Lack of openness, and tolerance for politics at corporate offices ... jfk ...
bane of many people's misery. VW is another one except that it was an on
purpose.

------
rdtwo
How can you guys take an article seriously that can’t even be bothered to get
basic factual information correctly.

------
markus_zhang
Just a symptom of late stage Capitalism.

------
tomohawk
> It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things
> like that

Such a non-insightful aside. Boeing produced many excellent planes, and during
that time functioned quite well in a capitalist system. In fact, was enabled
by it. As if a non-functioning managerial class never could happen in a
socialist bureaucracy.

Buying MD seems like it was mostly motivated by the profitability of defense
contracts, which usually just end up distorting a company's priorities, and
which are driven by decidedly non-capitalistic requirements of the military.
HP avoided defense contracts for decades for this very reason.

Hopefully Boeing will return to its capitalist roots and realize that it needs
to use the capital it has to satisfy the needs of its customers by building
great planes.

~~~
V_Terranova_Jr
I work with these large aerospace primes and see no consistent display of
vision, long-term thinking, or integrity among them. I'm not saying these
qualities don't exist within their ranks, just that they never become
overriding management values. Take a look at the qualifications of Lockheed
Martin's CEO or the President of Boeing Defense & Space. Yet, as the article
notes, despite being helmed by non-engineers in undoubtedly one of the most
technically-demanding sectors in society, these companies are richly rewarded
in the public marketplace. Wall Street clearly does not give a shit that these
"leaders" don't even truly understand their products.

Pretending that all these companies need to do is Adam Smith harder is crazy.
As long as they have $300-$400+ share prices, there is no market incentive for
them to not suck.

------
WalterBright
On the other hand, "Air Disasters" S13 E2 is about the crash of an Airbus A300
that stalled and crashed. The reason was because Airbus changed the way the
"go round" mode worked, and the pilots were not aware of it nor were trained
on it. The pilots kept pushing the nose down and the automation kept pulling
it up, until it crashed.

Airbus also has an Airworthiness Directive out on it for pitch instability:

" This AD was prompted by analysis of the behavior of the elevator aileron
computer (ELAC) L102 that revealed that excessive pitch attitude can occur in
certain conditions and during specific maneuvers. This AD requires revising
the airplane flight manual (AFM) to incorporate updated procedures and
operational limitations, as specified in a European Union Aviation Safety
Agency (EASA) AD, which is incorporated by reference. The FAA is issuing this
AD to address the unsafe condition on these products."

[http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/...](http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/0/6aeb8ae4513720768625845e00444321/$FILE/2019-15-02.pdf)

~~~
V_Terranova_Jr
Air France 447, Qantas 32, and Qantas 72 all highlighted significant flaws in
Airbus' Guidance/Nav/Controls subsystems and their automation approach. That
doesn't make the article's criticisms of Boeing the slightest bit less valid.

~~~
WalterBright
I didn't say the criticisms weren't valid. Why isn't Airbus undergoing the
same scrutiny? Causing a crash and losing everyone on board is just as serious
a problem.

------
joe_the_user
_Nearly_ TWO DECADES _before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-
maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly
toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud
“safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of
financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.”_ (Emphasis added).

But, the situation is that US air travel got safer during a lot of those two
decades. Indeed, the two crashes world aren't enough to push air travel back
two decades and safety standards and the rarity of crashes were enough catch
the problem.

The 737 Max is a huge problem for Boeing in particular, creating a situation
where the endgame is hard to see. But not as much for air travel generally,
which continues to be cheap and safe. And Boeing made a lot of planes and lot
of money in the last two decades.

Which is to say when things are "pushed to boards", it's hard to say exactly
when they give out. The 737 Max system was about minimizing costs everywhere
in the system - costs in testing, costs in training and costs in operation.
The multilevel Rube Goldberg approach finally failed but it's had a long run,
the 737 800 is a workhorse of air travel.

Still, I suppose the lesson is multilevel optimization can result in a
catastrophic systems failure. There are probably much processes where this
could happen - just think when all the cars are Internet connected.

