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Transportation Government

As Criticism Grows After Crashes, Boeing Committee May Recommend Organizational Changes (seattletimes.com) 93

McGruber summarizes an article in the New York Times: A small committee of Boeing's board is expected to call for several meaningful changes to the way the company is structured. The commitee may recommend that Boeing change aspects of its organizational structure, call for the creation of new groups focused on safety and encourage the company to consider making changes to the cockpits of future airplanes to accommodate a new generation of pilots, some of whom may have less training.

Currently, Boeing's top engineers report primarily to the business leaders for each airplane model, and secondarily to the company's chief engineer. "Under this model, engineers who identify problems that might slow a jet's development could face resistance from executives whose jobs revolve around meeting production deadlines," reports the New York Times. "The committee recommends flipping the reporting lines, so that top engineers report primarily to Boeing's chief engineer, and secondarily to business unit leaders.

"Another key recommendation calls for establishing a new safety group that will work across the company..."

"Though the committee did not investigate the two crashes of Boeing's 737 MAX jet, their findings represent the company's most direct effort yet to reform its internal processes after the accidents, which killed 346 people."

Meanwhile, a scathing article in the New Republic outlines the need for change, criticizing "pilot errorists" who have attempted to shift focus and blame from Boeing's own missteps in creating "a self-hijacking plane": In the now infamous debacle of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company produced a plane outfitted with a half-assed bit of software programmed to override all pilot input and nosedive when a little vane on the side of the fuselage told it the nose was pitching up. The vane was also not terribly reliable, possibly due to assembly line lapses reported by a whistle-blower, and when the plane processed the bad data it received, it promptly dove into the sea. It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators...

[T]here was something unsettlingly familiar when the world first learned of MCAS in November, about two weeks after the system's unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death. It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made -- and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management's endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees. Down in South Carolina, a nonunion Boeing assembly line that opened in 2011 had for years churned out scores of whistle-blower complaints and wrongful termination lawsuits packed with scenes wherein quality-control documents were regularly forged, employees who enforced standards were sabotaged, and planes were routinely delivered to airlines with loose screws, scratched windows, and random debris everywhere. The MCAS crash was just the latest installment in a broader pattern...

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As Criticism Grows After Crashes, Boeing Committee May Recommend Organizational Changes

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  • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @11:39AM (#59223826)

    Software company where I used to work, to development dept. about product 80% done: "It compiles and starts up? We promised it to the customers and already sold it, so ship it!"

    Airplane company: "It's put together and engines start, we promised it to the customers and already sold it, so ship it!"

    same thing, so no problem

    • Every time I got forced into one of these "We promised it by COB Friday" situations, I'd just turn it over and tell the sales/marketing twat responsible "Challenger, you're go at throttle up".
      • But they won't blame that twat that brought in money (fraudulently of course, since he sold something that didn't exist) when things don't work. Guess who they'll blame?

    • by tinkerton ( 199273 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @01:20PM (#59224182)

      The quality issues Boeing has are in no way comparable to software quality problems. The reference for aviation is much higher. Boeing has failed to deliver compared to aviation standards but these standards are very high.
      However, once a company gets into a regime where it is allowed to fool itself about the safety of it planes there is no knowing where it ends. And then I think of the Challenger disaster where the engineers thought an optimistic estimate for the Shuttle failing was 1/300 while the managers thought it was more like 1/300000. Someone should ask the engineers at Boeing. They know.

      • Hahaha, the reference is not higher.

        The software I spoke of crashed, as do Boeing planes. It's the same thing.

  • capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alw53 ( 702722 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @11:46AM (#59223860)
    Guess how many pilots Boing has on its board of directors. Zero.
    • How about passengers?

    • Just stuff the board of directors into a 747 MAX and make them fly with that from now on. It proves that the plane is so safe that they even put their lives into its hands or it crashes. Either way, problem solved.

      • I am afraid it won't help, greedy people are greedy.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].

        On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its vapor for 60 seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems. [..] Midgley would later have to take leave of absence from work after being diagnosed with lead poisoning.

    • How many programmers ? As already said, you have to be crazy to NOT have SOFTWARE catch a DIVE when altitude is >=100m.
      There should be like N autonomous systems to GO UP, GO UP when direction==down and alt==100m ....

      but sure you closet Marxist blame it on capitalism !! Like everything. All bugs on github are caused by ... capitalism !!!oneone
    • Re:capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)

      by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @12:27PM (#59223978) Journal
      Boeing used to be ran by engineers, not by MBAs. That is what made them great.
      Now, it is the MBAs are destroying it. MBAs destroyed MD by outsourcing a great deal of the DC-10/MD-11, and the same type of MBAs got control of Boeing after the merger, and are working to destroy Boeing.
      • I've heard something similar , but there the merger with the arms manufacturers in the nineties were considered the culprit, because they have completely different standards.

      • Re:capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Beeftopia ( 1846720 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @02:07PM (#59224338)

        There seem to be two archetypes in business:

        1) The Ant: This type focuses on building great products and the long-term viability of the business.

        2) The Grasshopper: This type focuses are extracting maximum profit for executives now, with secondary or less concern about the product, and no concern for the long term viability of the business. In fact, in some cases, bankrupting the business can actually extract once-in-a-lifetime profit for the executives. [nyu.edu]

        In the original Ant and Grasshopper story, the grasshopper is destroyed when winter comes. Today, because of a mature economy, grasshoppers are rewarded and are able to move from one company to the next. The financial system is also structured to reward this behavior.

        "There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey." -- John Ruskin [brainyquote.com]

        In my experience Duracell batteries also went this path. Those batteries leak so much. I've had multiple devices destroyed by them. But they made fantastic Superbowl commercials and an attractive battery so executives got paid "right now". But, when this model is applied to life-and-death systems, the failures are more costly and brutal to the user.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • that is it in a nutshell.
          The MBAs are grasshoppers, while the engineers are ants. Problem is, that stockholders will back greediness. Companies need to change back to what we wwere pre-reagan. Executives were not allowed to hold ANY publicly traded stock in that industry. That way, there was no reason to manipulate it for personal gain.

          Instead, the ideal situation would be that there are 2 types of stock, public vs employee only. Board members/Executives/senior management would not be allowed to own p
        • by Agripa ( 139780 )

          In my experience Duracell batteries also went this path. Those batteries leak so much. I've had multiple devices destroyed by them. But they made fantastic Superbowl commercials and an attractive battery so executives got paid "right now". But, when this model is applied to life-and-death systems, the failures are more costly and brutal to the user.

          I have had at least as much trouble with EverReady alkaline batteries leaking starting from about the same time. I think what actually changed is that alkaline batteries used to have a tiny amount of mercury in them which prevented corrosion but that was removed and Duracell and EverReady never changed their designs to make up for it. Or maybe everybody's alkaline batteries leak now after being discharged.

      • Re:capitalism (Score:5, Informative)

        by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @07:15PM (#59225106)

        Here is a long writeup someone made in 2003 that called out this exact thing.

        The Downfall of a Great American Airplane Company - An Insider's Perspective [airliners.net]

        It predicted everything that has happened so far to a T.

        During the past several years, Boeing Commercial Airplanes has been offloading its design engineering work to foreign "design centers". 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. Many of the Russian engineers are not nearly as experienced as the American engineers being laid off. Engineering layoffs have cut so deeply into Boeing's talent pool that knowledge has been irretrievably lost. And the layoffs continue.

        Soon Boeing may reach (if it hasn't already) a "point of no return" where irreversible damage has been done to the company's ability to design and build safe airplanes, even with its so-called "risk-sharing partners".

        It's a long read but worth it.

        • I distincty remember a Russian engineer writing about his experience at Boeing Moscow design center (I am fluent in Russian} and his opinion of American engineers at Boeing was that they weren't nearly as competent as they have thought themselves to be.

        • Oh, it gets better. I WORKED at Boeing (both directly and indirectly via a subsidiary). I can tell you a LOT of stories about them. Ever since we switched to MBAs running the company, it has gone downhill.
    • So Boeing has made at least one correct decision.

      People on this site have some pretty wacky ideas about what decisions get made at the board of directors level and what skills are applicable.

  • by 2TecTom ( 311314 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @11:48AM (#59223868) Homepage Journal

    A lot of corporations have exactly the same problem, they've become corrupted by affluence and power, the elites at the top are rarely, if ever, held to account, and are compensated way beyond any reasonable level of pay. They're just using their authority to enrich themselves with little or no regard for the consequences. We desperately need corporate reform. Corporates cannot continue to be used to put the upper class beyond the reach of legal responsibility. In Europe, there are laws which are intended to ensure that those in corporations are held personally accountable for their decisions. Until the same thing happens everywhere, the affluent upper class will continue to behave irresponsibly and unethically. The public systems well all rely upon have become corrupted and there needs to be a complete overhaul regarding how corporations are legally structured so they cannot be used to circumvent the law and to allow people to avoid the consequences of their unethical behavior. This is, in my view, the main problem from which most other serious issues the world is struggling against arise from. Unbridled greed has taken over at the highest levels of our societies, and our leaders live in a fantasy of excess with little or no connection to reality.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by blindseer ( 891256 )

      The whole reason for the concept of a corporation was to limit personal losses so that people felt free to go into business without losing their shirts. Removing that protection will have a very chilling effect on corporations developing anything more complex than a plastic coat hanger.

      There's also the matter of holding any one person responsible on a project that likely employs hundreds, or even thousands, of people. In something as large and complex as a modern passenger jet this means many many people,

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        holding people accountable is not ruining their lives, in fact, it's the exact opposite, nice try tho

        imho, corporate responsibility is the greatest threat this world faces

      • Do you work for Boeing?

        Funny how Airbus does very well despite not operating in a country with the bullshit system of treating a company as a person, hiding all the people who work at it behind the veil.

        I know whose planes I would rather fly.

      • by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @06:38PM (#59225038) Journal

        The whole reason for the concept of a corporation was to limit personal losses so that people felt free to go into business without losing their shirts.

        Wrong, it is primarily to protect investors.

  • MCAS half-assed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alw53 ( 702722 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @11:56AM (#59223892)
    Normally software should not command a dive when the airspeed is close to Vmax and elevation is 1000 feet off the ground, doh. MCAS would happily drive trim to pitch-down maximum.
    • Re:MCAS half-assed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @02:14PM (#59224364)

      Normally software should not command a dive when the airspeed is close to Vmax and elevation is 1000 feet off the ground, doh. MCAS would happily drive trim to pitch-down maximum.

      This is the software operating as designed and is needed with the current design. If the software didn't do this ant he pilot flew the plane as if it was a normal 737 then the plane would go nose up, slow down, stall and fall to the ground. This only becomes a problem if the sensor fails. Unfortunately there's only one non-redundant sensor so that's bound to happen occasionally.

      Fundamental to this is that, to properly solve the issue you have to actually redesign the whole plane with a higher undercarriage (so that the bigger engines can hang further back). Even to just patch this to be approximately safe you need to make physical hardware changes, for example a redundant sensor, and also training changes so that the pilots know what to do when the system isn't working. It seems neither Boeing nor the FAA is going to admit that.

      • by amorsen ( 7485 )

        You could get quite far simply by telling the pilots that this is not a 1967 Boeing 737 Classic. If you are flying slowly, do not suddenly apply full throttle or the nose may pitch up harder than you can correct with the elevator. However, that would require a separate type certification for the pilots which in turn would require the pilots to actually fly the plane with an instructor on board before being sent out on their own.

        If that had happened, the instructor might also have found it useful to mention

        • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

          My gut feeling is that if Boeing had just accepted that the 737MAX would need a separate type certification back in March and disabled the MCAS they would be back in business by now. Put another way it would have been cheaper to type certify all the pilots than fix the MCAS.

          Boeing management have gambled that they could get an update MCAS certified for flying much quicker than looks likely. For starters regulation authorities outside the USA are not going to take the FAA's word for anything (because it turn

      • by alw53 ( 702722 )
        Looks like MCAS was not integrated with other systems. Who would design a system that commands more pitch down when the aircraft is already in a dive as measured by the gyros and over vmax as measured by airspeed indicator. There's no way its near a stall.
        • Somebody who is looking for a "quick fix" for a deficiency in the aerodynamics of the aircraft!
      • There was a very long opinion piece in the New York Times recently arguing that the 737 Max is actually largely safe. I don't know that I agree with the author as I think (s)he left out a few important points.

        It's not clear that the plane would "go nose up, slow down, and stall." Although the engines do cause some pitch up, there are plenty of aircraft out there where the engines cause pitch up. The pilots can handle this. What seems to be different with the 737 Max is that the flaps are simply not la

    • Nobody disputes that MCAS was a miserably designed piece of software that never should have been on a plane, and that Boeing massively screwed up.

      BUT, MCAS was designed with the assumption that the pilot would see what is going on immediately, provide trim input to counter the downward forces MCAS was issuing, and maybe after a few times of it repeating shut off the electric trim and hand fly the plane. In the Etheopian crash, with full awareness of the MCAS system, the crew failed to do that; their traini

      • The Lion Air crew didn't even know that MCAS existed and it doesn't seem that they were very effective at all. The Ethiopian Airlines crew (who did know about MCAS) got a lot of things wrong but they also got a lot of things right. Normally with a runaway trim it is a mechanical issue (like a switch that is stuck) and it's the *first* thing that goes wrong. Pilots should be able to recognize and counter that. In the MCAS case, *first* the AOA sensor fails and the stick starts shaking to warn of a stall.
        • Lion Air kept flying the plane, from the data almost instinctively, for ~8 minutes. That is pretty good in my book given the obstacles. It is a little surprising that they didn’t recognize runaway trim in that period with over 30 pilot trim inputs, but they didn’t have sufficient information to fight the system.

          Ethiopian should have known a little better, but didn’t manage to keep the plane in the air as long.

  • As the article points out, it has to do with unions and regulations driving the cost up and the company looking to cut costs as a result. Interventionism also caused Boeing to grow to its current size and scope, without the government floating billions in an otherwise failing company, we've created a monster institution large enough to do whatever it wants without competitors.

    It's easy to blame capitalism as the source of all evil when these markets in the US are not at all capitalistic due to continuous go

    • by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @12:25PM (#59223968)
      Bullshit. This current debacle is the result of too-unfettered capitalism. Your pathetic attempt to blame the flies clinging to this runaway horse is just laughable. You can't solve runaway monopolistic capitalism by making it less responsible for its own corruption.
      • Is that what you're saying? That all software bugs ever all the fault of capitalism ?

        The fact they couldn't program for shit is ofc not their fault. Nothing is their fault, poor poor opressed mega-company. It's the fault of big bad capitalism that they can't unit test they warez.

        Really? alt==100m && direction==down then DIVE!!! Really? Really?
        • by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @12:51PM (#59224086)
          Not quite sure how to parse that. GP was saying that the corner-cutting was the result of the poor, put-upon corporation responding to added costs due to "unions" and "regulations"; which is just nonsense, Boeing was being lazy and greedy because nobody was able to prevent them from being lazy and greedy. Actually, the big bad "government regulators" GP was whining about had allowed Boeing to inspect/certify themselves - with predictable results - they passed with flying colors!!
      • by jsrjsr ( 658966 )

        Capitalism works over the long run. In this case, Boeing will either change or go bankrupt. There might not be time for Boeing to change before it goes bankrupt.

        The problem is that people die in the short term.

        • by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @02:13PM (#59224362)

          People have claimed that before and I agree that Boeing should have failed, only, a long, long time ago.

          The problem is that when Boeing is failing (which happened after the last economic downturn), it simply asks Uncle Sam to intervene and then the Administration forces other companies or even countries to buy Boeing by giving out incentives.

          Boeing has been on the chopping block about every decade or so due to some major malfunction within the company and each time the government steps in and prevents them from spinning off pieces, from laying off people etc etc under the guise of European and Chinese protectionism doing the same thing (Obama), national defense reasons (Bush) etc etc going back all the way to "Soviets will win the space race if Boeing isn't saved"

      • You're claiming "too-unfettered capitalism" in the aviation industry? I'm sorry, but are you truly not aware of exactly how much government regulation is imposed on all things flying? I'm not saying that regulation is a bad thing. After all, we have reasonably affordable and very safe worldwide air travel, which seems like we've managed to find a pretty good balance.

        There are obviously things that need fixing at Boeing, and perhaps the FAA as well. I think even Boeing sees the writing on the wall here.

    • Capitalism is not the blame. Nor is it Unions/Regulations. It is pure and simple, MBAs who do not have a single original thought amongst the group of them. Prior to outsourcing, Boeing was THE Leader and most profitable. Now....
      • Under a capitalist system, companies that are driven by MBAs are the ones that will predominate.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Yes, the power of the MBA is what emerges from capitalism. It's perfectly natural, along with all the regulatory capture.

        Remember, it's *Whatever the market will bear*. It's the perfect setup, requires no planning or thought, or any other of your grand conspiracies. It just happens.

        And every two years we squander the opportunity to "fix" it.

        Flying is no fun anymore anyway. The air is all hazy up there now from all the smog... can't see a damn thing

    • As the article points out, it has to do with unions and regulations driving the cost up and the company looking to cut costs as a result.

      You clearly read a different article, because this one 'points out' no such thing.

      • by guruevi ( 827432 )

        It does but then it comes to the wrong conclusion that those are all the fault of capitalism. Sure Boeing itself is capitalist but it has in the near and far pasts abused interventionist government policies to prevent competition.

        • No, no it really doesn't. The only 'cost' that the article details for Boeing related to regulation and unions was the inability to freely manufacture deathtraps by cutting costs. You're putting the cart before the horse, there. It's definitely not the fault of capitalism as such either, of course. It was a result of exactly what the article points toward as a cause - changing management going for short-term gains without looking to long-term effects.
    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      Ahm, isn't that capitalism though? People respond to the pressures and rewards of the system they are operating in. Shuffle the company, the industry, the types of people.. if they are MBAs or Engineers or Underwater Basket Weavers, if they are operating in an economic system that causes people and companies that behave and prioritize in certain ways to rise up the ranks, then you will get this same problem over and over because there is nothing special about the type of degree people get or the industry
    • It's easy to blame capitalism as the source of all evil when these markets in the US are not at all capitalistic due to continuous government intervention. What we need is more companies making planes and plane parts so Boeing can have some real competition.

      Indeed. And we shouldn't blame communism for the U.S.S.R, that was just a minor oopsie of management. Nor should we blame guns for the rampant number of shootouts and injuries or deaths; instead we should add more guns so that we may create some real competition. Maybe even a high-score board?

      Do you honestly believe that you should judge capitalism purely on its theoretical perfect execution and not in how it actually motivates people to act? That would make you the equivalent of a chess player that only th

  • Meanwhile a NYT article supports Boeing by saying it's all the fault of the airlines who hire inexperienced pilots: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com] It doesn't explain how, if it needs considerable experience to fly a 737Max, new pilots are ever going to get the required experience.
    • It doesn't explain how, if it needs considerable experience to fly a 737Max, new pilots are ever going to get the required experience.

      Maybe they need to start early at flight schools.

      They could buy a bunch of trainers, mod them with faulty sensor vanes and software to become the "Cessna T-37 MAX", then let Darwin sort them out.

    • It is articles like this which the author of the topic article rails about. Rightly I think. The NYTimes article looks like damage control. It also misrepresents the serious problems the plane has, problems a software updatecannot fix .

    • by amorsen ( 7485 ) <benny+slashdot@amorsen.dk> on Sunday September 22, 2019 @02:44PM (#59224470)

      From the article:

      "That’s a runaway trim. Such failures are easily countered by the pilot — first by using the control column to give opposing elevator, then by flipping a couple of switches to shut off the electrics before reverting to a perfectly capable parallel system of manual trim. But it seemed that for some reason, the Lion Air crew might not have resorted to the simple solution."

      They conveniently forget to mention that the "simple" solution of doing manual trim does not actually work, unless you happen to have the Hulk nearby.

      • From the article:

        "That’s a runaway trim. Such failures are easily countered by the pilot — first by using the control column to give opposing elevator, then by flipping a couple of switches to shut off the electrics before reverting to a perfectly capable parallel system of manual trim. But it seemed that for some reason, the Lion Air crew might not have resorted to the simple solution."

        They conveniently forget to mention that the "simple" solution of doing manual trim does not actually work, unless you happen to have the Hulk nearby.

        Not only didn't they mentioned that this method didn't work. They even suggest it wasn't tried. Which, as far as I know, not true.

        In any case the start of the article (paywall) focusses on Lion Air and what a crappy company it is. Harsh but there is some truth in it.
        The unconvenient truth is that the same cannot be said about Ethiopian Airlines. Which is widely know to be a high quality airline with a very good reputation.

        • The Lion Air pilots (if you take the article at face value) weren't qualified to fly crop dusters. And Lion Air does seem to be a pretty crappy company. The Ethiopian Airlines pilots got a lot of things right (and also some things wrong). You can't manual trim if you are already way out of trim and in overspeed which is what happened to the Ethiopian Airlines pilots. They tried to disable MCAS but turning on auto-pilot which is creative but not the correct solution. What the article didn't mention is h
      • You can't do manual trim if you are already in the terrible situation that the Ethiopian airline pilots were in where you are terribly out of trim and you are also in an overspeed situation. I read the NYT opinion piece and it makes a lot of good points. I posted at length about it earlier in the thread. What the author gets wrong is that the MCAS only fails when there are already *other* failures. It doesn't fail independently. The sequence is that the stick starts shaking indicating a stall. You try
  • by DecentDiscourse ( 6184580 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @12:59PM (#59224120)
    That article in the NYTimes was a real cheap shot. Blaming pilots for failing to survive Boeing's murder machine is beyond low class. And that the Times falls for that, well, no surprise. The fact of the matter is that excellent pilots were confronted by a secret riddle that had no business being on the plane in the first place. But watch closely. Behind the scenes Boeing and their Republican pals are preparing the groundwork to make it so that no airline has to tell you what type of equipment you are flying on when you book and they will also make sure that if they switch equipment on you to a refurbished MAX, you will have no choice but to fly or lose your money. Hooray for capitalism and crooked politicians.
    • I'm glad you got a +4 but the opinion piece made a lot of good points and I think that it's good that the NYT ran it. The author didn't convince me but it was well written and did make some valid points. Should the NYT really refuse to run a well-written and informed editorial just because it disagrees with current opinion? Even if it brings new information to light? For all the reasons I've previously posted, I don't agree with the author, but I still think he made valid points and I'm better informed
  • Why blame capitalism when blaming incompetence will do?

    The USA and it's capitalist system brought leaps in technology in the aerospace industry. While the USA put volunteers on the moon the USSR had to coerce and threaten test pilots to fly. And rumor has it in some cases the pilots had to be beaten and/or drugged to get them in the craft to fly. Capitalism brought to market what the socialists could only hope to copy, and they often did so poorly.

    This failure of the 737 MAX should not be excused because

    • You couldn't be more wrong. This is pure corruption (ok, gambling). The same kind that crashed two shuttles, and made the Ford Pinto famous. And apparently, it's good business. The markets are up.

      Everything is capitalism [cnbc.com]. Deals have to be made, or nothing gets done.

    • > Why blame capitalism when blaming incompetence will do?

      It seems like they have no idea what capitalism even is.

      A single mega-monopoly on aircraft created by government regulation is the furthest thing from capitalism you can find.

    • by _merlin ( 160982 )

      If the goal was to save money then they failed, and this will be a lesson to future capitalists that want to cut corners. A lesson that was certainly learned long ago, but perhaps needs a reminder every so often.

      So a few hundred dead people "every so often" is all we need to remind people not to cut corners.

  • by Spinlock_1977 ( 777598 ) <{moc.oohay} {ta} {7791_kcolnipS}> on Sunday September 22, 2019 @01:27PM (#59224204) Journal

    Engineers reporting to engineers!

    This has been mostly missing since the early 2000's, when 'business managers' were put in charge development teams more and more often. I never understood this. I'll extend this thought to the Agile movement - which, in my opinion, essentially says 'build un-researched features in increments tiny enough to be understood by know-nothing business managers, and relegate engineering concerns to the back shelf'.

    Long before Agile came along, software engineers reported to software engineers. This made 'software engineering' the main focus of the team - not a bad objective if good code, security, and team growth is a priority. And however surprising it may be to today's crop of young business managers, we turned out lots of awesome software with a minimum of fuss. And we did it without Agile.

    Every organization I've worked for in the last 20 years has implemented faux-agile, and the results are no better (in my opinion) than a development group led by a real software engineer.

    I'm excitied for Boeing; I'm really hoping this spurs new thinking that eschews business managers running development teams. Frankly, business managers put their focus on timelines and feature increments. They rely on inaccurate automated systems to judge code quality - human engineers are largely out of the loop.

    It's true that many large-scale projects ran way over-budget, but the press made a hay-day out of it and the Agile movements was born. But smart people can building anything together, and I doubt that the magic Agile-pill will ever fix incompetence. And these days, it seems to be fueling it.

    I'd rather not fly on software built this way.

  • Then I would care.
    Perhaps.

  • by BlueCoder ( 223005 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @01:32PM (#59224224)

    The first one is in the outright design of the plane. Rather than redesign the plane they went ahead with what they had rather than face the delays of government review again. The plane was going to sell big time and the bean counters rushed it to market. Rather that redesigning and moving the landing gear placement they relied on a field "software fix". Next instead of installing three or four sensors for proper redundancy as they said they were going to do they sold the idea of software fix to the FAA (they are already saving money) and then the bean counters decided the only needed one sensor and would sell redundancy only as an added on upgrade.... An upgrade to improve the safety of their flawed design.... Not only are you going to pay for a flawed airplane were going to make you pay for the fix to make it safe to fly.... Then when they designed the user interface for the plane and did everything they could to hide the design flaw because they knew sooner or later someone would sue over it.

    This is why bean counters should not be allowed to pretend to be engineers. It's just like the 86 shuttle disaster. We need these people to sign on the dotted line that they will do jail time when their bullshit doesn't pan out and people die. Nothing extreme. Just sitting in a cell for two month staring at a picture of a person with big words below it... "This person is dead because of YOU." And do this for each and every person that died.

  • All this just enforces what I've noticed several years ago already; In corporate world the bottom line has become the #1 priority by such an enormous margin that product quality and safety have become almost irrelevant.

    As for why this is, it's probably due to how the incentive structure has been set up such that there's really not much you can do to climb the corporate ladder than making more money than other managers. Because of this the internal politics of corporations have become profit driven rat ra
  • how many Boeing managers are going to jail for involuntary manslaughter.

  • by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Sunday September 22, 2019 @05:27PM (#59224892)

    "some of whom may have less training". Give me a break! Boeing has not learned a thing, they are still trying to spin out this lie even when absolutely caught. Boeing is just plain unrepentant, and if left to govern themselves will most certainly offend again, leading to more tragedy.

  • And the attitude implied by this article is pure bullshit!

    I can assure you that from the CEO all the way to the janitor, everybody, less the inevitable couple of psychopaths, does give a damn about the millions of lives their work impacts on a daily basis.

    You don't have to believe me but you are just kidding yourself if you think Boeing is just a bunch of wanton asses who do not care about the flying public. They do care because that is the nature of human kind.

    NO SANE PERSON deliberately goes out of their

    • NO SANE PERSON deliberately goes out of their way to endanger hundreds if not thousands of lives.

      So what? What makes you think nobody in charge at Boeing is a psychopath? You think that's impossible?

  • The monetary system of the United States has been built on Government-approved counterfeit, i.e. fake money. Corporate executives have become so busy chasing after fake money that they're now building fake aircraft.

  • What is going on in Boeing, and IBM, and SC Edison, and Toys-R-India, and company after company after company is an outsourcing/save money culture. USA talent was dumped in favor of Indiascum. The Indiascum did not do a good job, for self-evident reasons. The "top engineers" were dumped to save bucks. This is the H-1B culture result.

"All the people are so happy now, their heads are caving in. I'm glad they are a snowman with protective rubber skin" -- They Might Be Giants

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