Hacker News Reader

Comment by ReGenGen | Hacker News Reader

The 737 Max keeps getting viewed as an "Engineering Failure" but we should consider if this really was a "Management" failure. The unstated goal w/MCAS was to avoid additional pilot type certification. (If you tell pilots about MCAS, give them an off switch, or if the system switches off... then pilots need to be trained specifically on the MAX.) If management gave the MCAS project to Senior Boeing Engineers they would likely push back jeopardizing unstated goals. Executives likely steered this project to junior engineering or yes-men... who delivered a solution which avoided pilot training.

View on HN

The article states that MCAS was implemented "on the hush-hush," which makes me wonder if it could even be subject to the same level of quality control as other features of the software.

It might have had to bypass some of the more stringent parts of Boeing's development process to avoid appearing in documentation that the customer or the FAA might see.

This appears to be what happpened.

If so, it amounts to criminal negligence. People should go to jail, but if anybody does, it will certainly not be the ones ultimately responsible. Most likely Boeing will pay fines and court judgments, something probably already factored into their stock price, impacting people holding the stock this year, not those who might have demanded better management five years ago.

Certainly the whole top tier of management should be fired, but that won't happen either.

How about the fact that one plane full of people going down was not enough to wake everyone up. No, we need two planes to go down, and still the FAA was telling us we have nothing to be concerned about. The biggest problem here is not the engineering or even the management. Its regulatory capture.

> The 737 Max keeps getting viewed as an "Engineering Failure" but we should consider if this really was a "Management" failure. The unstated goal w/MCAS was to avoid additional pilot type certification.

The failures were first political, second managerial, and third ethical. The actual engineering failure is a far fourth.

This is true, but any number of engineers still should have blown the whistle. The driving force may have been managerial greed, but other factors still could have averted it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com