November 2019 New Yorker piece about what went wrong at Boeing
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-case-again...
tl;dr engineers vs. accountants
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-case-again...
tl;dr engineers vs. accountants
Not convinced Boeing have learnt their lesson.
From his Wiki:
He graduated in 1982 from Sioux Center High School in Sioux Center, Iowa.[3] He received a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Iowa State University, followed by a master's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington.[1]
I think there's more to do it that just having an engineer or accountant as CEO.
1. Drive MCAS with only one AOA sensor.
2. Don't tell MCAS to look for (or even think about) bad AOA data or AOA disagreements.
3. Don't actually bother to tell pilots that they don't have AOA disagree warning lights.
4. Don't bother to tell pilots that MCAS exists at all.
5. Don't test MCAS subsystem to see what it actually does with bad AOA data.
6. Give MCAS a ridiculous amount of control authority, operating cumulatively over repeated applications to exceed what the pilot can manually override.
7. Change how the trim stab switch has been wired since 1966 and not tell pilots.
It’s not the accounts or union stewards that should be facing criminal charges, it’s the engineers. At a minimum, any PEs should be yanked.
Can you point to where in the PE Code of Ethics it says that cutting corners due to "pressure to deliver" is okay? The whole purpose of the PE designation is to avoid circumstances like that.
https://www.enr.com/articles/38400-why-engineers-must-rememb...
“Many false theories persist about the cause of this fatal collapse. The failure was not due to poor workmanship, shoddy materials, a rushed schedule, swaying from dancing, “harmonic vibrations” from the music, poor contractor communication or design changes that did not receive proper review.
As documented in the official investigation report, two professional engineers issued sealed design drawings without performing critical calculations to determine whether sufficient load capacity existed.”
HackerNews, generally, has a hate on for "business people", who are seen as evil, ne'er-do-wells, while the "engineers" are innocent employees, merely following orders.
I think it's because most people here see themselves as the engineer type, and this mindset allows them to feel better about the work they're doing, be it emissions scandals, ad-tech, building the surveillance state apparatus or phony medical devices: "don't blame me, I'm just following orders!"
These are not the typical engineering biased organization if you ask me... but still they put very strong blame on the organizational and company culture changes created by 'accountants' allowing ineffective and in many cases oppressed situations, leading to repeated disasters!
Do not try to misdirect this very serious story into primitive occupation bias please!
The fact that MCAS was required was not a failure to design a safe plane. Rather it was a failure to make the plane behave like the 737.
Sounds like the typical stupid idea suggested by a marketer or accountant that engineers beg and plead not to do.
Frankly, the whole thing reeks of profit at the expense of engineering, safety, and security.
It sounds like we need to find out who that person was and arrest them.
Engineers told to "make it happen" while all safety backdrops they have get undermined by from the top business mandates end up having to make bad decisions.
I'll accept that the engineers involved had the chance too say no. I won't, however, accept the assertion the business/sales people do not share some level of blame for not realizing that they were making impossible demands, and that the resistance from engineering was not just something to be worked around by busting the union, or misleading customers and regulators.
So in short: all of those were caused by the accountants....
“One of the people familiar with MCAS’s evolution said the _system designers_ didn’t see any need to add an additional sensor or redundancy because the hazard assessment had determined that an MCAS failure in normal flight would only qualify in the “major” category for which the single sensor is the norm.