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Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

> Boeing is huge, and what they develop is incredibly complex. There are a lot of people with differing level of competence, ethics, and goals.

That is true... however it's also true both of the big aerospace companies have an abundance of very smart engineers who by their very nature would have been responsible enough and inquisitive enough to notice this defect even if it was not their direct responsibility (good engineers will step out of their box).

Knowing how vital that sensor is (regardless of the stupid reason for it being vital) and not building in redundancy is such an obvious flaw to any engineer - The reason with almost certainty will have been because that multiple observations of this safety flaw would have been squashed by some big execs due to the business requirements and economics and a severe lack of morals.

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>good engineers will step out of their box

Malignant cultures can do a lot to reduce this. The platonic ideal engineer will cross any number of organizational boundaries to deliver a needed piece of information, but there can be a lot of pressure to leave those boundaries un-crossed. Depending on how political the organization is, a strange engineer (or their manager) dropping in from nowhere to tell you a mistake was made may even be seen as a bad thing.

In addition aerospace, like most other traditional engineering fields, is heavily biased towards seniority. Years of experience actually matter[1], and more junior engineers often have an uphill battle trying to convince more senior engineers of errors. In aerospace in particular it's a side effect of having systems so complex that first impressions of a subsystem can give you intuitions that are wrong in the context of the larger system, even though they may seem right in isolation.

[1] More than they should, in my opinion.

The Challenger disaster is a good example of an engineer who did warn the right people but they ignored him; I would bet bottom dollar something similar happened with these Boeing tragedies. The pressure to launch is great and who wants to be the person who stalls "progress".

Every single human on earth would agree that this is what should be done, but this is naive. Of course it should be done. How do we actually accomplish it?

    good engineers will step out of their box

Good engineers are often prevented or discouraged from stepping out of their boxes by organizational structures.

Engineers also typically have intense workloads.

Getting a solid week's worth of engineering done is hard enough as it is.

Heroically crossing boundaries and leaping outside of organizational boxes to solve problems carries, at the very least, a high risk of falling behind on other work assigned to you.

In defense of organizations (and those who create them), coordinating hundreds or thousands of people is really hard. How do you create a strong enough structure to avoid chaos, while simultaneously allowing people to step outside/across that structure when the need arises? It ain't easy.

Also, and I don't know anything about how Boeing operates, but I suspect they already are successful at this to a large degree. Their record is not spotless, including some cover-ups they're guilty of, but it is very good. They would not be a world leader in aviation with highly competitive planes if they weren't pretty good at this stuff.

This problem does not take heroic leaps outside of boundaries and risk to careers... it's so obviously wrong that simply pointing it out should suffice, this isn't another challenger problem, this is staring anyone in the face blinding fucking obvious.

My point is that this _would_ have happened, people will have pointed it out, because it takes so little effort and because it's such an obviously wrong flaw. But some exec will have overruled them multiple times because money > safety.

Engineering had a perfectly good solution - a warning system that lets the crew know when the AoA sensors were out of whack.

Unfortunately, somebody else decided to make it optional equipment. And some airlines decided not to pay for it.

So uh, tell us how this was an engineering problem, exactly?

... I'm saying it's NOT an engineering problem, it's a problem of people NOT listening to engineers. I don't think I could be much more clear.

My mistake! Sorry! I think I must have conflated a few different comments in my mind.

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