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My friend made it slightly under a year at Boeing after working for another airline as a maintenance mechanic. The level of quality control at Boeing was so abysmal he quit to work on busses, paying all $20k in relocation back to Boeing.

He takes pride in the quality of his work and adherence to the rules, but Boeing's managers let him know that reporting unwired bolts & incorrectly installed hardware per policy was something they did not do. Very sketchy, not something anyone wants to be signing off on as personally liable!

The management loves to circlejerk about the "Boeing process", but lots of shit is slipping through these days that would have been unacceptable (and firable) only 2 decades ago.

If your friend wanted to go on record, i'm sure there'd be plenty of reporters eager to hear about it. As long as the only whistleblowers about Boeing's quality control are union execs and anonymous friends of internet commenters I have a hard time giving that too much weight.

Its already ruined his life and pushed him back to the bottle, I doubt I could entice him to do anything relating to Boeing.

Edit: Here is a piece New York Times did on exactly what I'm talking about: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...

> Cost savings is always the root cause of every engineering failure, so long as you have the benefit of hindsight. I mean once you know what the problem is you can spend money to fix it, and they should have spent that money right off the bat, right?

I once heard it said that any reasonably smart person can build a bridge that doesn't collapse. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that just barely doesn't collapse, by an acceptable safety margin that still provides economy. So yes; any unforeseen failure exists because of that tradeoff.

The counterexample you name, the Space Shuttle, is just a series of fundamental mistakes compounded together--a boondoggle machine designed for a dozen different mission profiles, most of which never happened, and introduced serious regressions in survivability and launch escape compared to Apollo.

The pithy way of saying it is "Engineering is making something with $1 that any fool could make with $2"

> It takes an engineer to build a bridge that just barely doesn't collapse

Cute saying, but an aircraft doesn't really share this property. You can make a bridge or building stronger by just adding more stuff. Many pyramids and stone bridges have held up admirably even after thousands of years.

You can't make a better aircraft by just adding more stuff. Very soon, it becomes incapable of its primary purpose.

I mean, most things will fly at least somewhat if you bolt on a big enough jet engine :) But I see your point.

The Space Shuttle disaster was a symptom of the US political process.

No, it wasn't a 'symptom' of anything. The Space Shuttle was a remarkable engineering achievement, made at enormous cost, built and managed by great people who had only the best intentions. Yet it still failed in a spectacular way, because the engineering wasn't perfect and the management wasn't perfect. In the end Challenger was destroyed by the failure of a cheap gasket, and the gasket failed because the decisions made and processes which produced the environment in which those decisions were made around making a go/no-go call was imperfect and failed. It doesn't matter what political process is in place, it doesn't matter how good the people are, or how good the engineering is, or anything else for that matter, spectacular failures are inevitable. When one happens, we have to learn from it and figure out how to build organizations and engineering artifacts that are better in practical and achievable ways, not try to use it as some kind of evidence that our pet political theory would have somehow let people make perfect decisions or make rubber gaskets invulnerable to cold weather.

It turns out that if you take some task that is incredibly hard and inherently complex and performed by a very large number of extremely qualified and smart people near the limits of human experience, and you want to do that task in a better way it isn't going to boil down to something simple or obvious.

In fact, if the US political process is so broken, why is it the only process that ends up with space shuttles sitting in hangers? It's certainly not perfect, but since nobody can point to a political process that results in better space shuttles I don't see any evidence that humans have so far developed a better political process if you are measuring it in units of 'space shuttle reliability'.

If you are not aware, I recommend you look up the design process for the space shuttle. It is a perfect example of engineering taking a backseat to politics.

TL;DR version:

The original design of the space shuttle was vastly smaller and simpler, but during the cold war the only way you could get something funded was to have a military dual use. So the Department of Defense offered NASA funding so long as they redesign the entire space shuttle to be able to capture and return Soviet satellites to the US -- a task that it never performed -- which required the design to be massively compromised.

Would you consider the Soviet Burans in Kazakhstan ‘sitting in hangers’?

The design of those shuttles lacked the flaw that contributed to the Challenger tragedy.

So, what was the engineering reason for implementing a US design requiring o-rings?

Umm... you do know the Buran only launched once with no humans aboard before being scrapped?

I’m pretty sure there were plenty of flaws that would have shown up if Buran had flown 100+ real orbital missions.

The Russians had the good sense not to sacrifice a dozen human lives on the altar of their space shuttle program. As a direct consequence of that decision, they also still have the ability to launch manned spacecraft, unlike the United States.

The launcher it was to use was hilariously dangerous. (Saturn V is but in a different way.) The thing would be killed before it even a achieved space. At least they managed to salvage the excellent engines out of the project.

Communism—which is otherwise an intolerably terrible system—led to manned space stations and safer, more reliable manned launch vehicles (namely Soyuz and Shenzhou). It’s a national embarrassment that the US sacrificed billions of dollars and a dozen human lives on the shuttle boondoggle and ended up with no human launch capacity for over a decade and counting.

Doing things that are “incredibly hard and inherently complex” and also unnecessary and dangerous is idiotic. Things like building and flying a space shuttle rather than a normal space capsule. Especially when human lives are at stake.

> It takes an engineer to build a bridge that just barely doesn't collapse, by an acceptable safety margin that still provides economy.

Holy crap, that truck in oncoming traffic just barely avoided hitting us head on!

If that driver hadn't adjusted their speed appropriately for the road conditions and planned on switching lanes a quarter mile back we'd all be goners, bro.

> Apparently he was an engineer sometime in the past, now his job is to push anything that will benefit members of the union, which is what he is doing here. He has no specific information about the MAX to offer.

The executives of Boeing have pushed anything to benefit the company throughout this story, changing their narrative multiple times. Boeing has handled this entire saga so poorly that I truly don't understand the POV that the union is somehow responsible.

The cost savings hindsight argument doesn't address that this was an entirely preventable failure that was caused purely by miscommunication, disorganization, and greed. It's not like the aircraft experienced some unforeseen phenomenon that engineers have never recorded, they introduced a haphazardly flawed feature, they failed to clearly communicate the feature to clients, they failed to properly train the pilots, and people died.

I don't think anybody was suggesting that the union is responsible, just that a union exec is not a "boeing engineer" as the headline claims, and whistleblowing by an actual engineer who worked on the MAX program and has actual knowledge would be a very different story than just more armchair criticism.

I think the task of making a public statement from the engineering point of view, that could be career limiting, is exactly the kind of thing that a high ranking engineering union official should be doing as part of his job representing those engineers. If he is NOT speaking publicly the POV that engineers are grumbling to each other privately, he's not doing his job. This kind of statement is exactly what he should be doing.

The problem is that there is no content in this statement. No matter what the actual situation in the company, no matter what happens and without regard for any facts, a union representative is going to say that the best course of action is to stop using non-union labor and to increase wages for union labor. It is literally their full time job to say this whenever and in the most effective way they can.

>This kind of statement is exactly what he should be doing.

which is kind of my point - he's just doing his job and making a completely predictable and expected statement. I'm not trying to say he shouldn't, but it isn't interesting or newsworthy.

> Trying to vilify people and attempting to create an environment to produce massive punitive damages and lawsuits, or to bring political pressure to change staffing decisions dramatically decreases safety. The FAA has spent almost a hundred years building up an environment of cooperation with a shared responsibility to understand failures and enable the changing of the entire aviation industry whenever necessary to promote safety. This has been fabulously successful.

346 dead passengers is definitely not successful or acceptable. You think the rating/MCAS problem doesn't merit further investigation?

I have no idea how you could possibly think I'm saying it shouldn't be investigated. I also don't understand how you could think that a union representative complaining about the company using non-union workers is the same as investigating the problem?

Investigating, understanding, and changing regulations and future policies and behavior is what we need. A witch hunt with a bunch of vested interests trying to benefit financially and find a scapegoat is not what we need.

This is a great comment. Engineering is about cost cutting. Everything is a trade off performance, safety, efficiency, and cost.

Cost control or cost-benefit trades are certainly a critical aspect of engineering but saying "Engineering is about cost cutting" is way overstating the case. There absolutely is a difference between a short-term cost-driven engineering culture and one that weighs costs with a strategic view. I am actively involved in remediation of an engineering program that suffered from the former. It will cost significantly more money in the long run to have done it that way, assuming the program survives.

> This comment from a 'boeing engineer' has basically no information content.

I found his "3 Business Cultures" quite informative:

https://kuow-prod.imgix.net/store/77d64a0b1331588db82efa7812...

> Creating an environment where companies have to be afraid to admit mistakes does not help us find the root causes of problems and change the system to prevent those problems in the future.

'Feelings' ("afraid") are not operative here. A company in a highly regulated industry has a societal and legal duty to be forthright regarding their product. The sort of "fear" that companies need to feel is "being afraid of getting caught lying or covering up their mistakes".

Cost trade offs need to be made in a well reasoned way though.

I have no idea if this applies to Boeing. But a "cost cutting culture" can be due to the internal market within the company. The widget department wants to make enough money to meet its budget. So it unilaterally makes changes to the process that affect the quality of the overall product.