It’s is called Boeing but this failure is really McDonnell Douglas.
Being back engineering leadership supremacy.
Being back engineering leadership supremacy.
Sales/financial: make as much money as possible
Engineering: make the best product possible
Old Boeing was successful with the later group in charge, new Boeing (post MD merger) is the former.
Engineering supremacy in that context means that if engineering says no, it’s definite.
What Boeing needs is QA supremacy: nobody wants them to be particularly creative, original, or unusually hard-working when doing audits; they need to be thorough and systematic. We need to make sure that their voice isn’t challenged.
QA supremacy makes sense, but it relies on the merits of QA (that QA are competing to be the best) to avoid false positives/negatives rather than rubber stamping, no?
The last CEO was an engineer.
MCAS was designed by engineers.
The clearly over complicated door plug system was designed by engineers.
It looks like the engineers are the problem and the MBAs get to clean it up.
The MBAs elected to cover it up from the manual because that would hurt their sales goals of not needing pilot training.
Yes, sales/marketing and management leeches have a lot of control over documentation that leaves the company.
The best part is, it was the leeches that decided to make a fucking indicator light that told you the sensors for MCAS were unhappy, a PAID FUCKING ADDON.
The last CEO was an engineer who got thrown under the bus for the 737 crashes while not being the CEO when it was designed. He was pissing too many leeches off internally so they threw him under the bus.
I know two long time employees of Boeing that left after the last CEO was removed because roughly paraphrasing "Wow, this company is fucked, he was actually trying to fix the company"
1) to keep the new engines that change how the plane flies
2) a convincing lie that passes minimal scrutiny that the plane flies the same - to avoid training pilots to a perfectly good new plane
3) after engineering came with the MCAS solution MBAs drove the cost down and removed redundancy - after all the whole feature was a secret so no one would demand redundancy
It may be a little early for armchair engineering; we should probably wait for a failure analysis report. But the door plug doesn't seem overly complicated. Put the plug in, bolt it on, tada. Where's the complication? The bolts are supposed to have safety wire to keep them from loosening by vibration.
Anyhow it was a management decision to not tell about the MCAS changes (not to mention what led to requiring it), management kind of does affect the engineering choices, and is it really over complicated to require 4 rivets?
American engineers and technical designers are being laid off by the hundreds while Russian engineers are quietly hired at the Boeing Design Center in Moscow.
There's a reason people don't let the inmates run the asylum.