Crash Course. How Boeing's managerial revolution led to the 737 Max disaster.

Kick Back and Relax in the Cheers! Forum. Thoughts on life or want advice or thoughts from other pca members. Or just plain "chill". Originator of da Babe threads.
Post Reply
User avatar
FlyingPenguin
Flightless Bird
Posts: 32773
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:13 am
Location: Central Florida
Contact:

Crash Course. How Boeing's managerial revolution led to the 737 Max disaster.

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Very interesting look at the culture at Boeing that led to the 737 Max fiasco. Long read but worth it.

https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/ ... revolution
"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

Image
User avatar
Pugsley
Posts: 7454
Joined: Mon Aug 19, 2002 11:54 pm
Location: NW Indiana
Contact:

Re: Crash Course. How Boeing's managerial revolution led to the 737 Max disaster.

Post by Pugsley »

Im going to take a stab at this with out having read the article and say it was the "managements" fault.
User avatar
FlyingPenguin
Flightless Bird
Posts: 32773
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:13 am
Location: Central Florida
Contact:

Re: Crash Course. How Boeing's managerial lo revolution led to the 737 Max disaster.

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Yeah, that article attacks Boeing for a money first, engineering second attitude. I think there's more than that. Certainly Boeing was trying to save money by trying to keep the Max under the original 1960s certification, and MCAS was a bandaid for that which was not properly tested or explained to pilots so they could deal with it's failure.

Here's another perspective I'm reading right now. Also a long read but very informative, about how deregulation in the East is breeding a generation of pilots who fly by rote, and aren't as aggressively trained in 'airmanship' as US pilots, and that contributed to the problem as well. There's a lot of real good details about the crashes here. Stuff that hasn't been mentioned in shorter stories:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/maga ... ashes.html

MCAS was a technical mistake, no doubt, but Boeing assumes a skilled pilot is always the ultimate backup for a system failure in the 737, and it could be argued that a well trained pilot might have been able to overcome the failure of MCAS. Airbus, on the other hand, builds their equivalent A320 aircraft 'for dummies'. They lean heavily on automation, specifically targetting carriers with less skilled pilots. As such, their automation is much more redundant.

Both designs have their flaws. A fair amount of Airbus crashes were due to the automation not allowing the pilot to save the plane. The A320 won't let a pilot fly the plane outside the envelope, but in rare circumstances that's exactly what needs to be done to save it. A 737 will allow the pilot to do anything he wants - even fly it into the ground - albeit while sounding a lot of alarms That's why a lot of US pilots don't like Airbus planes. They feel they're not fully in control, and the way pilots are trained here is to always be in control.

Add to that, a lot of these airlines in eastern countries have very poor maintenance, which just exacerbates the problem.
"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

Image
Post Reply