This is a much more in-depth article on the development history of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that details the management decisions and corporate culture. It's a very good read, though with...
This is a much more in-depth article on the development history of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that details the management decisions and corporate culture. It's a very good read, though with occasional hyperbole in the description of the design as "self-hijacking".
There are grave allegations that Boeing's recommended checklist for stabilization issues actually contributed to the crashes, rather than mitigating the MCAS issues:
The upshot was that Boeing had not only outfitted the MAX with a deadly piece of software; it had also taken the additional step of instructing pilots to respond to an erroneous activation of the software by literally attempting the impossible. MCAS alone had taken twelve minutes to down Lion Air 610; in the Ethiopian crash, the MCAS software, overridden by pilots hitting the cutout switches as per Boeing’s instructions, had cut that time line in half. Lemme had seen a lot of stupidity from his old employer over the years, but he found this whole mess “frankly stunning.”
This article also directly contradicts the narrative of pilot error previously referenced in the New York Times article in the prior Tildes topic.
It specifically indicts that narrative as deliberate obfuscation:
But, as it generally goes when a corporate malefactor is caught doing something wrong, we have also unlearned some things about Boeing and the MAX. Starting almost immediately after the Ethiopian crash, Daniel Elwell and Sam Graves, respectively the then-acting FAA chief and the ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, led a coordinated campaign to blame the dead pilots for crashing the planes. The crux of their argument was that there was nothing to see here—that correct execution of the runaway stabilizer checklist would have saved all 346 lives, and that the real scandal behind the two crashes was a regime of lax foreign pilot training standards. Graves proceeded, in the storied tradition of congressional grandstanding, to call for the Department of Transportation to launch an investigation into this manifest nonissue.
The pilot errorists took their primary talking points from a blog post titled “The Boeing 737 Max 8 Crashes: The Case for Pilot Error,” written by two pilots and published on a site called Seeking Alpha. According to The Seattle Times, the post in question had been commissioned by one of Boeing’s institutional shareholders; and the error-narrative picked up additional bursts of momentum by aggregating random little scooplets turned up in the media’s voracious focus on the MAX soap opera. The Wall Street Journal, in particular, homed in laserlike on matters of pilot behavior—even managing to transform the impossibility of manual flight under the conditions of the Ethiopian crash into a story about the FAA’s new concern that “female” pilots might lack the physical strength to fly the old-fashioned way.
Full disclosure and statement of principle: In May, I quit a job at a company that was proceeding down this exact same path of outsourcing, engineering by management decree, share buybacks at the expense of sound investment and research... These practices are a cancer of unregulated capitalism, and should be disclosed as dangers to public safety and the global economy.
All this presumes that Boeing will be able to financially engineer its own continued existence through the next decade of lawsuits, or Airbus and other companies taking huge swathes of market...
All this presumes that Boeing will be able to financially engineer its own continued existence through the next decade of lawsuits, or Airbus and other companies taking huge swathes of market share on the basis of Boeing's loss of safety, reliability, and cost efficiency.
This is a much more in-depth article on the development history of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that details the management decisions and corporate culture. It's a very good read, though with occasional hyperbole in the description of the design as "self-hijacking".
There are grave allegations that Boeing's recommended checklist for stabilization issues actually contributed to the crashes, rather than mitigating the MCAS issues:
This article also directly contradicts the narrative of pilot error previously referenced in the New York Times article in the prior Tildes topic.
It specifically indicts that narrative as deliberate obfuscation:
Full disclosure and statement of principle: In May, I quit a job at a company that was proceeding down this exact same path of outsourcing, engineering by management decree, share buybacks at the expense of sound investment and research... These practices are a cancer of unregulated capitalism, and should be disclosed as dangers to public safety and the global economy.
All this presumes that Boeing will be able to financially engineer its own continued existence through the next decade of lawsuits, or Airbus and other companies taking huge swathes of market share on the basis of Boeing's loss of safety, reliability, and cost efficiency.