In a way is this not an appropriate response for multiple breaches? If I was CSO and my company was plagued by breaches that came about because of my lack of oversight when it was my job I’d fully expect to be fired.
I don’t believe a single incident is equivalent in this case to what happened to the MAX platform, to much has gone wrong
Untrue (in general). The CSO is frequently given lots of budget and authority. Having talked to some of the big bank executive teams, they have thousands of employees and hundreds of M$ budgets with wide latitude to enforce restrictions. It is just that the best commercial cybersecurity processes and “best practices” are useless against professional attackers with even minimal budgets and staff.
Any technically competent CSO knows they are totally screwed even if they implement everything feasible perfectly (i.e. no inane solution like shutting down the whole company). It is not a problem of resources or commitment (though you could also have those problems), it is a problem of impossibility due to the incompetence of commercial IT cybersecurity processes.
The only way to survive in a environment where you literally can not do what you were ostensibly hired to do is to lie and take the fall. The only other alternative is being too stupid to realize you are screwed, but every bank cybersecurity executive team I’ve ever met knew that someone could go in and steal all of their documents for less than 1 million dollars (you could also change things, but the out of band cross-checking makes that hard without intimate knowledge of the specific financial checks, more a question of knowing how banks work than hacking, the 1 M$ gives you full access rights, but you need to be careful not the drive the tank through the wall of the general’s office).
Banking and financial services average 8.1% of revenue on IT Spending. Industries like industrial manufacturing, food and beverage, retail, and energy average 1.2% - 1.9%.
Many security leaders (CISOs or otherwise) do not have the budget or authority to meet their board's or CEO's expectations, but it may be outside your sample of big banks.
I'm otherwise aligned with your comment. The successful CISOs I've interacted with, regardless of industry, educate their leadership team on the trade-offs and risks of investment levels, set realistic response and recovery times expectations based on those investments, and turn it into a business decision, rather than promising the impossible.
I said CISOs are uniformly incompetent at cybersecurity. No matter how many resources they are provided they are uniformly incapable of delivering security acceptable to the business customers, shareholders, and stakeholders.
There are exactly zero universes in which it is acceptable for a bank to be thoroughly compromised for 1 M$. If they wrote the truth in their advertising and investor documents there would be calls for blood. It is the job of the security organization to make sure the CEO is not aware of the truth so that the CEO can continue safely making statements palatable to the stakeholders.
This is not a problem that can be solved by the current actors through increased resources, effort, or focus. They have demonstrated they are incapable of achieving minimally acceptable outcomes across the entire range in every field. There are no gold standards to point to, no paragons to emulate, just piles of crap littering the wasteland. Meaningful security will not be attained until we throw away all of the commercial IT garbage and build things on the various high robustness systems designed and verified to protect against professional and state actors.
Back in the day there were moderate bounties offered ($100s) for finding security holes. It was far more cost effective than organized security review and testing.
I get the sentiment, but I much prefer this to the alternative, which is rank and file employees getting laid off. It’s much better to have accountability that starts at the top and then trickles down. Too often it feels like workers are the only ones who suffer from the bad decisions of executive leadership.
I don't think the rank-and-file are out of the woods yet. As far as this specific departure, he was a VP of the 737MAX program and for 2.x years at that. I presume there are equivalents for the rest of the 737 line and then for the 777, 787, etc. This does not even touch the rest of Boeing. Yes, he's a large fish but I don't see him as one of the truly big fishes. FWIW, I am not for or against this guy, I have no idea if he's part of the solution or prolonging the problem.
Completely off topic, but I always wondered what was so special about Deep Space 9's USS Defiant and its "ablative armour". Sure, it was a plot device, but everyone who encountered it seemed astounded by it.
I think it is important to note the Federation previously wasn’t in the business of building warships. They are so technically advanced, they didn’t need them.
As a friend of mine put it:
Everyone’s best warships are in a dead heat with a luxury liner full of nerds that happens to have guns on it.
Starfleet ships didn’t need armor. Their materials science was already so advanced, they had to use structural integrity and dampening fields to push beyond what existing physical materials could accomplish.
So when they roll out an actual warship using physical armor plating, it is an incredible advancement in materials beyond “simple” energy-reinforced hulls.
Alternatively, it’s really boring technology but the idea of a Starfleet warship is so new they are salivating over things everyone else has been using for centuries. It’s like giving a tank to a soccer mom and telling her to have fun in traffic.
Also off topic, but your comment "It's like giving a tank to a soccer mom and telling her to have fun in traffic" reminds me of the 1995 San Diego Tank Rampage where a guy stole a tank from a Nat'l Guard base and took it on the freeway.
Instead of expending energy to deflect energy weapons fire, the ablative armor undergoes controlled ablation so the outer layers of the armor vaporize or erode when struck by weapon fire, taking the brunt of the attack's energy. This meant that the "total energy" available to defend the ship wasn't limited by the ship's power but by the starbase assembling the ship and the armor could survive a lot more malfunction and battle damage (the shields became completely useless once they burned out). Until the introduction of the armor everyone thought that physical defenses couldn't be used effectively against energy weapons.
Voyager's ablative generator also provided regenerative capability so it didn't need a space dock to repair heavy damage.
Exactly what I was thinking (but much less cleverly worded). We KNOW these issues are the result of pressure from the top to maximize profit despite pushback from engineers.
I don't even understand how he could be expected to turn around such a complex beast of manufacturing that has been mismanaged for so long in under 2 years. It just isn't possible even if you burn both ends of the candle.
Steps in the right direction, let's get rid of more engineers and replace them with more MBAs.
> However, a person familiar with the decision and who asked not to be identified commenting on sensitive personnel decisions, confirmed that Clark’s leaving was not voluntary.
> Clark is an engineer. His successor Ringgold has business degrees. However she began her aviation career performing avionics systems maintenance and troubleshooting on C-130 aircraft in the United States Air Force.
While many here won't disagree in general, be wary of holding this sentiment as dogma. There can be bad apples in engineering, and MBAs who can see that whether or not they have the knowledge or experience to make it better themselves. Whether or not they can (or want to) make the next step of hiring better or more honest engineers is what matters then.
Sometimes (as rare as you expect, likely) an MBA has the tooling to fight back against the standard business pressures to cut costs, whereas an engineer is basically defenseless.
That's a funny way of spelling "Self-entitled jackass, who would spit on his own mother for a nickel", but I'll accept it.
Edit: I guess the DVs are just ignorant idiots. here is just one example of how stellar of a guy ole Jack was:
Under Welch's leadership, GE waged a twenty-year battle with the Environmental Protection Agency and New York State over polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that the company dumped into the Hudson River at its capacitor products division plant in Hudson Falls, New York.
The person you are quoting did not express approval of Jack Welch. You are being downvoted for being unnecessarily argumentative and inflamatory, not for being wrong.
I disagree, learning how bad certain business people are is useful for society. Jack Welch ruined the lives of many families and played an explicit role in giving people cancer by dumping waste into public spaces.
And the OP wasn't contributing to the truth about Jack Welch by simply skipping past what a jackass he was. He was technically an engineer, and spent 30+ years ignoring engineering, integrity and common sense, for the sake of profits. That's faux engineer, at best.
Every single time assholes are mentioned, their assholery should be mentioned too. Let's not rewrite history for those unaware of how these "people" acted.
By your logic, the only thing that should be mentioned about Pol Pot is that he was a leader of Cambodia at one point.
Yes but Boeing needs to send a message. A message that they understood how they failed, a message that they apologize, a message that they can be redeemed.
Sometimes, it’s about PR.
And culture, they haven’t changed. Boeing is still firing engineers, appointing MBAs, getting paid by politicians, and hiring on the revolving doors of local prisons. I wouldn’t even trust a burger flipped by this bunch. Boeing factories also need to move to other states before we trust them again.
I've mentioned it somewhere else, and maybe I've just been really unlucky with my experiences in industry but I'm at the point where I feel like someone with an MBA or finance background should start any new company (regardless of previous experience) by sitting in the janitor's closet for a month. If the janitor says they're ok, the MBA can start following the janitor around at a distance of 10 feet. If they don't screw anything up, they're allowed to ask one question a day of said janitor. So on and so forth. I estimate 10-15 years of persistence before the MBA/finance can be in a position to make minor decisions
This is the completely and utterly insufferable mindset that one gets when they spend too much time around other engineers and actually begins to buy into the completely fabricated self-important narrative that they are God’s gift to the world. It s a profession! Pull your head in. I’m not sure what sort of highschool bully trauma you’re trying to make up for, but being a bully yourself isn’t the answer. Interest rate rises couldn’t come soon enough, because there’s obviously at least one generation of techies that have been tricked into thinking that ‘finance’ starts and ends with “take a bunch of dumb VC money, build a completely unsustainable business, and change jobs every 18 months”.
I’m not for one second saying that Boeing hasn’t been seriously mismanaged. The whole debacle has just inexplicably been some sort of lightning rod for people that want to flex their self-identified nerd cred by saying “ENGINEER GOOD BUSINESS BAD!”
I don't think you're being all that fair here. I have no idea whether she's going to do a good job or not, but there's more to a person than the degree they got. Former military getting business degrees is pretty common and often the only reason is they were the most likely program to offer distance learning and night class options back in 2001. I'll say, as an engineer with a CS degree who is also a former commissioned officer, former military can be hit and miss, but in many ways I'd be more confident going with prior enlisted who got a degree via the GI Bill than other commissioned officers. There can be a tendency with the way we get trained in the military to become serious yes men. You never say no to a commander and you always attempt to accomplish any mission without question, no matter how ludicrous or impossible it is. That makes sense in wartime but not in business and many do not understand that or know how to turn off that attitude.
Prior enlisted, however, are usually not that fanatical about pleasing superiors. Their rating and promotion process is a lot saner and they tend to be more aligned and care more about the career field they were in. In her case, you can see this involved ensuring and maintaining the quality of aircraft comms and nav systems. That's probably not a bad place to come from. I was a tank commander back in the day myself, and I can say there was nobody who cared more that the tanks were reliable and safe than the career enlisted tank crewmen and tank mechanics. I would trust them with my life way before I would trust a career engineer who had never served on or with a crew.
From personal experience, once engineers go the MBA route they tend to lose their technical edge and get sucked into the vortex of the MBA universe. It's like some strange indoctrination process.
It makes sense. Engineers who get MBAs (or any second degree) usually do it early in their careers, so it's not like they have deep experiences to anchor them after they switch career path.
Absolutely, but systemically, that's not been their problem. Too many MBAs are making decisions without Engineering involvement. I know because my industry works the exact same way le rage
this is because shareholders (pension and investment fund managers) are all MBAs and they demand results a-la "quick wins" that forces management into short-term thinking, cutting corners and cutting costs
I suspect that it can also be likened to "when the only tool you have is a hammer...". An MBA will see a product with flagging sales and solve it by cutting people, products and costs to improve the numbers. An engineer will see that same problem as requiring changes to the product, or developing a new one.
The MO of ‘business people’ isn’t inherently ‘quick wins, bleed the company dry’. I have absolutely no idea why techies can be so precious about every problem in their profession actually being a ‘systems problem’ yet are so quick to personally blame each and every person in another profession based on some ‘YouTube video essay’-level understanding of the context.
As usual, it IS a system’s issue. It’s an incentive issue. If the people that made decisions were incentivised to prioritise long-term stability and performance, they would. They aren’t, and the reason they aren’t isn’t solved with a swift “get rid of them all”. You think that these big scary business people you demonise don’t themselves have KPIs? The pressure of corporate America, of short-term returns, is still going to be there. Have you seen how drastically the average shareholding lifespan has dropped over the last 10 years? Businesses are just operating in more of an environment where long-term stability and even growth don’t matter.
Boeing is such an easy target. It’s very easy to just lazily say “Boeing is rotten!” and leave it at that, because then you get to pretend that the solution is easier than it is. Whilst there are definitely Boeing-specific circumstances that heavily heavily contribute, the reality is that Boeing has had few chances to ‘innovate’ in recent memory, especially with its new makeup. This is just what it looks like when they do. The reality is that this is merely a reflection of how the wider world works. And that’s the thing with systems problems. It’s intellectually dishonest to just sit back and “blame MBAs”. These sorts of problems fester in the wiring and the mechanics, with unpredictable consequences that are almost impossible to reverse by the time they’re realised.
The wheels were set in motion before the Boeing merger. It wasn’t a trigger, it was a consequence. Similarly, some “MBAs” making decisions, either with Boeing or investors, were themselves not the trigger. Fate had already been decided several layers up the stack when personal and organisational incentives were set as they are in the first place.
It was at this point, that I knew you had no idea what you were talking about.
>The MO of ‘business people’ isn’t inherently ‘quick wins, bleed the company dry’.
It absolutely is the model, because humans gotta human.
I assure you that Engineers with knowledge of the products are rarely included in steering meetings, and when they are, they are window dressing.
I know this because I'm an expert in my field and over 3+ decades, this is pretty much exactly how technical people get handled when it comes to meetings and decisions.
Guess who occupies most of the C-suite. Do you think it's engineers? No, its MBAs.
MBAs are NOT the source of all things bad, but lets not break our arms jerking them off over the "great work" they've done.
Well in the 737 MAX case here it is. There are multiple engineering failures, and regardless the management pressures there are specific engineers who implemented them and who signed them off.
We can consider 3 common ways this could have happened.
1. Engineering incompetence.
2. Mgmt pressure.
3. Engineering failure. As in legitimately attempted, but missed the mark.
Considering how this company has operated, for decades, it's fairly simple to point to Option 2 as the most likely culprit. Option 1 is possible, but unlikely, since there are a number of engineers involved. Option 3 is also possible and could still be the issue, but if we were betting, it would be option 2, because they've already proven, that's who they are.
Looks like MBAs doing a CYA and throwing the Engs under the bus.
Why did this action take _this_ long for this to happen? To me it says they were burying their heads in the sand hoping things would blow over.
I'll believe Boeing if they turn a new leaf and prioritize engineering over marketing and being number one in aircraft deliveries in the short-term at the cost of long-term viability.
I know that there was a Boeing sub with a doc repository
whose internal address was "TheBlameThrower". It had the explicit purpose of nailing specific people for saying specific things. So throwing people under transmissions is something of a company sport, with points awarded for distance and style.
Mmmmm, there was a delicious "Under-Bus-Throw Contest" in the wake of the MCAS fiasco, centered around their chief technical test pilot, Mark Forkner.
Keep in mind that half of this is anecdotal, but the sequence of events was something like this. Crap goes down, Forkner gets canned. He leaks documents, and wow, that was super bad. Now something curious happens, more docs get leaked - from <s>who knows where</s> - showing that Forkner was a bit of a burnt out cynical a-hole[1]. Now, imagine those chats going to the media - it would make that person seem like the real villain, yes? The DOJ thought so too, so the leak brought criminal fraud charges on Forkner. After that, even worse documents were leaked - probably from Forkner or his attorney's people - and the charges get walked back, because it's insanely obvious that whatever fraud he might have been committing was done at the behest of his masters. A colossal cock up, part of the bigger cock up that was the PR blitz following the MCAS crashes, which was itself a subset of the Ubersturmbanfuhrer Cockup of the MCAS fiasco. It's cockups all the way up.
In this tit for tat, the only one with the bomb craters showing was Boeing's rep, because, let's be honest here, at the end of the day even if Forkner was a horrible asshole he was still Boeing's representative to the goddamn flying world.
Terribly calculated, terribly executed, terrible results. A masterclass in how not to do public relations and, failing that, dirty tricks campaigns.
[1] You know the type. The guy who always ends each IM with some quip about what crap your company is making and how he feels like a con artist. His soul, hollow and shrivelled from all the sucking sounds, tends to kick cats and hiss at dogs. Leak that to the media, see who the villain is now.
I see a lot of comments trying to pin point the problem with a name. People: if in an airplane some pieces are taken off, they have to be labeled. In fact anything entering or leaving the airplane has to be noted, juat like in an op-room, to avoid for example forgetting tools (or loose bolts) somewhere. That is basic ABC 101 of working in an airplane.
Why this happened? Massive cost cuts ordered by management, which led to cut corners, or cut trainings, or both. If ing. Or MBA is irrelevant.
If I have to guess, I would point to an MBA
This was actually a QA problem — a set of design issues starting at the front of the process. All QC can do is identify problems after they have occurred.
As the saying goes, “you can’t test quality into a product.”
I guess I am a bit confused. Someone was supposed to be checking the bolts before the plane left the facility and they didn't. That seems to be a QC process issue more than a QA issue.
But that also seems like splitting hairs. The problem is not one of engineering design, to OP's post.
I disagree somewhat. It should not be possible for a plane to leave the factory without completing all QC checks. People are fallible, so a robust process is critical, and designing/confirming a robust QC process is a QA responsibility.
Sure, but "did the plane leave with all of the bolts it was supposed to" does not seem like a question that needs to be answered by someone with mechanical engineering degree. Let alone the responsibility of someone sitting in a cubicle in Everett.
How do we know that it was just 'someone was supposed to be checking the bolts before the plane left the facility and they didn't'. Because I'm not sure it's actually been fully revealed where the problem was. And despite the production issues, I'm of the opinion that the door-plug design should have been fail safe like the other doors where just pressure prevents them from being opened during flight. And another thing, passing the buck to QA doesn't let engineering off the hook since QC in this setting is a part of the engineering!
The person you're replying to was being sarcastic. But -- to be clear -- this was clearly a problem with the defect tracking process, not like individual QC contributors.
My question is, "was the defect tracking process influenced negatively by spending cuts?"
Shareholders are more than willing to reward the relevant executives for cutting spending, but they rarely hold the same people who made those cuts for issues stemming as a consequence of the aforementioned cuts.
A friend of mine who used to work for Boeing said the downward trend started when they acquired McDonnell Douglas and the MD bean counters took over a lot of top positions at Boeing, displacing engineers. After that cost-cutting became more of an obsession than building awesome aircraft. Makes me wonder how Boeing can avoid descending into bankruptcy at this point with multiple major projects having significant issues, recalls, and safety issues.
Well, the MD acquisition didn't happen in a vacuum. At the time Airbus was becoming a government-backed behemoth, and the US government was allocating all of their political capital and military procurement at MD. So the whole point of acquiring MD was to get more favorable government treatment.
What followed was not necessarily even about cost-cutting - they wanted to spread out the production of their aircraft from centralized locations (easy to QC) to cover as many different congressional districts and reap the maximum amount of political capital.
If you have a weed problem, I'm not sure it's worthwhile to blame the weeds. There's a higher level problem here with how government procurement and tax structures works, and just with how incentives are aligned this kind of stuff is bound to happen regardless of whether lobbying is explicitly allowed or not.
In this instance, it seems like the government was actually pressuring the government to do its bidding, rather than the other way around. There have been many articles written about the ways the Clinton administration pressured Boeing to purchase McDonnell Douglas (which was suffering from the cancellation of many military programs).
It's pretty common. Company A is doing well, company B is much smaller than company A, A acquires B, A's executives get wonderful retirement parachutes and promote B's executives. Thus A gets to be run by B as if B had acquired A rather than the inverse.
There is so little competition, and it would be so expensive to spin something up… I could see it sputtering along for many years. Who can disrupt this? Need space X level money and research, and not sure the profit potential is as high.
It is really hard. China, Russia and Japan have tried state sponsored schemes without success. Bombardier of Canada had to throw in the towel, and Embraer of Brazil almost did.
Part of the problem is also that airlines have been very good at squeezing the duopoly while demanding ever more. The competition, if it manages to get a plane in the air, usually isn’t as fuel efficient and so the airlines have mostly not been interested.
Boeing filed ta petition with the USITC, but it was ultimately the Department of Commerce that fined them for what they decided was unfair trade.
The USITC reversed their own decision a year or so later, and Boeing chose to not appeal the decision, but Bombardier and Canada ended up deciding to not pursue things further.
Bombardier had a lot of other problems going on as well. Generally, their entire transportation division (they also had railcar manufacturing) had manufacturing and timeline issues. The price cut that resulted in the dumping penalties was an attempt to shore up a program that was already flailing.
Russia just got a considerable motivation boost due to sanctions so the local order book for SSJ and MC families will be likely on the scale of hundreds of aircrafts. They are no longer a prestige project and Russia has the track record of building the necessary industrial capacity quickly (they ramped up military production to support war in Ukraine far beyond of what the West thought was possible in that time frame).
I wouldn’t really call it disruptive; they’re using Russian aircraft because they have to. Anyone who has a choice in the matter will still pick the duopoly because of better dispatch reliability and fuel efficiency.
C919 isn't China's first attempt. But they have a long term view of the industry and should be able to make progress even if they only satisfy some of their own domestic demand.
Russia has a fleet of ~200 Superjet planes which are handling a significant fraction of domestic traffic, but it's indeed not clear whether any more may be built after the 2022 sanctions. They also currently do not have engine replacements.
>They also currently do not have engine replacements.
They demonstrated localized version of SSJ-100 with PD-8 engine in 2023. I'm not sure if it actually flew, but there were at least ground tests of the fully assembled aircraft.
Even if it's possible to retrofit existing fleet with PD-8, I can't imagine this happening at the rate at which the old (partly French-made) engines will be going out of order. So even that fleet will dwindle in numbers in the next years. Perhaps to zero, perhaps not - we'll see.
I much rather fly in an E195 E2 than a 737 or A320 Neo. Really next level. KLM has these, unfortunately they rarely use them to my destination because they can fill a 737 to there as well :(
Commercial aircraft are significantly more complex and regulated than rockets are (for now). Many companies can develop aircraft (e.g. bombardier), but few can actually get them into production.
>Makes me wonder how Boeing can avoid descending into bankruptcy at this point with multiple major projects having significant issues, recalls, and safety issues.
Boeing is a duopoly with Airbus and for putting in your hands in a brand new Airbus you will have to join the queue and wait five years. So they benefit from the lack of competition, if the merger with McDonnel had never happened, probably this situation would be different. But today's capitalism is all about consolidating and eliminating competition.
Embraer might try to venture in the wide body segment, but they don't seem willing to do that move.
Embraer seems to have the highest standards, or very close to highest, in the industry now. But I think it's unlikely that they'll be capable and willing to compete with Boeing or Airbus in the near future.
I can't help but wonder how successful a project it would be if Embraer built a 757 clone (but with modern engines and cabin). If executed correctly that could put Embraer on an equal footing with Boeing and Airbus in the narrowbody market (and their C-390 is a widebody that could be modified into a passenger carrier...).
I worked with several co-workers who were former Boeing, but on the software side. They all left to start a new startup, and they all said the same thing.
> Mike Fleming, who led the 737 MAX return-to-service push after the two fatal crashes and has since then led the drive to certify the MAX 7 and MAX 10, has been promoted to replace Lund as senior vice president and general manager of all Boeing Commercial airplane programs
Ooo pretty. The person responsible for the self certification failures is getting promoted.
Has there been any word/news on addressing the self-certifying portion of these issues?
From what I gather, in addition to management prioritizing the wrong things, there has also been the issue of not enough external oversight to hold them accountable for safety.
I am surprised it takes this long to make someone accountable. But it is too little too late, though a step in the right direction. It is clear that this program was flawed right from the get go.
He's only been on the job for two years, coming in to manage the project after the MCAS disaster. In some sense he's the easy person to eject.
I don't think the individuals really matter that much here. The point to firing executives in charge of big failures is to incentivize the ones remaining to get their ships under control before another disaster. Clark clearly failed on that front, but again the 737 MAX program isn't the end of Boeing's problems.
Engineers designed and built that plane. The plane is fundamentally flawed. The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there.
The problems almost certainly go deeper than engineering. It sounds like there's pressure to cut costs. Still, an engineer has a responsibility to design and build a safe airplane. If the budget prevents that, it's still the engineers' responsibility to make sure that whatever plane they can build is safe or they shouldn't build it. It's a total cop out to put it all on the MBA's when it's layer upon layer of failures that result in a plane as bad as the 737 MAX. Engineers in commercial aviation shouldn't ever be afforded the luxury of pointing the finger at their bosses. Their job above all others is to protect lives by building a good airplane.
This is not how companies work. Engineers at Boeing didn't have a design labeled "not-good-enough-but-cheap" and another labelled "more-skookum-but-is-expensive" and because they were bad engineers decided to go with the cheap one. It's a systemic issue due to cost cutting by, you guessed it, people MBA's.
No engineer, if given the choice, would have re-used the old plane design instead of designing a fully new, modern plane, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.
No engineer, if given the choice, would have put the plane through as little testing as they did or sold it as not requiring much training for pilots, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.
No engineer, if given the choice, would have separated the manufacturing facility out of Boeing, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.
These are decisions that were pushed by higher ups (with MBAs) that engineers have to live with. They aren't "wrong" decisions, there is nothing in them an engineer could look at and say "this will, 100% cause a failure down the road and I demand we not do this". What they are is steps in the wrong direction, steps away from the "best" decision that could have made from a safety and quality standpoint. Take enough and eventually they add up into what happened.
I think the best way I can put it is if, as an engineering org that deals with real world things, you aren't pushing towards best practices, higher standards, and technical excellence than you are either stagnating or declining. In either case your quality will decline without anyone doing anything "wrong" as you end up with people with increasingly less experience and resources being asked to do more work. And the worst part is you can get away with that and often companies do. But if you go to far eventually you cross a threshold where cumulative effects push you over the boundary of failure.
And no engineer would have gone with only two AoA sensors.
And no engineer would have made the computer ignore one of those two AoA sensors because two isn't enough and now you have a dilemma of which to trust.
And no engineer would have cooked up the cockamamie idea of hiding the new CAS scheme so that they could claim that the new plane was the same type as the previous plane.
And no engineer would have insisted that the new plane was the same type as the previous plane.
And no engineer would have threatened the U.S. Congress with canceling the whole program if they don't get the waivers needed to get the plane flying.
Yet, the engineers did go with two AoA sensors. The MBA’s aren’t putting the planes together. Ultimately, it’s engineers who build the planes within the budget and parameters set by the bean counters. Somebody decided 2 AoA sensors were good enough and the engineers built it that way, presumably giving the ok to use just 2 sensors or they would have cut some other corner instead.
There’s plenty of blame to go around and many people deserve to be fired, but this notion that the engineers should get a free pass because an MBA told them to do it is absurd. Obviously, it was engineers giving assurances they could, in fact, build a safe airplane per requirements. It’s silly to think management would go through with building a plane if the engineers had told them in no uncertain terms that it had fundamental flaws. It’s a big fat fail all around.
But it wasn't an engineer, nor any one person, that made all the decisions that lead to this failure. It was company culture, driven from the top down, to cut costs. Who is accountable for that?
Who is at fault if a cars brakes fail? The mechanic that installed them wrong? Or the boss that overworked them, expected them to get more brakes installed for less money every year, didn't give them the proper training to learn how to install the brakes, and hired that mechanic after firing the senior one with more experience because the new mechanic was cheaper?
If the engineer doesn't remove the 3rd sensor to match cost expectations of the bean counter, then the bean counter can always find another engineer, fresh out of school, afraid for his job and CV, with no real-world experience, that WILL remove that 3rd sensor if someone yells at him/her or is offered a promotion for his/her "achievements". This new engineer will also cost less to hire than the old experienced engineer.
Yes. But a company with good engineering culture will also have review schemes that the bean counter can't get around without having to remove all the "troublesome" senior engineers who do the reviews.
> The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there.
This engineer guy was the one that took over after they fired the last one after the 2 crashes...
No, that's a meme. Clearly the problem with the door plug was a production process problem. They engineered a bad process[1] and it led to a failure. Was that due to pressure or interference from someone on the "MBA side"? Well, maybe? But that needs evidence before you can make a statement like you did, and so far we don't have it.
[1] Seems like consensus at this point is that the repair/rework review process had a hole contractors/suppliers could use to skip reviews by changing a category. Again, that might be done for "MBA" reasons but if the process allowed it it's still a bug in the process.
and when they fire the rest of them and move the headquarters back to Renton (or wherever the engineers live), not VA. and pick some brilliant management with both engineering and business experience, that have strong incentives to make boeing a success long-term. and when pigs learn to fly. and somewhat after that, with a lot of work and good luck, it might get a little better.
Based on the fact that we are experiencing a competence crisis right now, particularly in aviation but also more generally. Someone with that many years of technical experience should probably just be mentoring 100% of the time.
