If you're not able to keep promises you shouldn't make them in the first place. The buck stops with you, period.
No pilot training was often used as an argument. But I think the problem was actually much more severe.
If Boeing would have designed a completely new plane (which they should have) they would have lost a decade to Airbus' offerings in their most important market.
That, in my opinion, was the real reason for that shoddy hack of a plane.
But if they'd been honest about the fix, required pilot training, maybe this problem would have been discovered in a less catastrophic way so it could have been fixed earlier. It wouldn't have been as cheap as they'd like, but they'd still have a foot in the door in that market and they'd have their reputation. Now they squandered everything.
The horrible thing is that this sentence could be applied to other Boeing products as well. The Delta IV springs to mind.
I don't know how you can look at this whole situation and think "yup, free market working as planned. Everything fine and normal!"
Besides, the reason we have regulations is because there are limits to the free market if we want to live in a sane society. Markets only find optimal solutions if everybody has perfect information, but in reality nobody has perfect information. You're free to choose between brands of honey, but it's expected that the government will ensure that no honey contains plutonium because 1) a consumer can't easily tell if it does and 2) it's assumed that everyone would avoid radioactive honey if they knew about it. Similarly, airlines are free to choose between aircraft, but it's assumed that none of them want an aircraft that will spontaneously and uncontrollably dive into the ground; it's the government's job to ensure that nobody sells such a plane.
We always listened to our clients, and their wants and needs, but we also always put the robustness and the reliability of the platform over any feature request, no matter how adamant, vocal, or lucrative the client.
A big part of being a provider is to be the expert, to be the voice that says “what you are asking for is dangerous, and we will not do it”, and being prepared to sacrifice short term client pleasing for long term stability and overall client happiness. The customer is not the expert. They are not qualified to make decisions that endanger themselves and other customers. This is why they are paying you.
Yes, they’ll be thrilled when they get their shiny new blank, but hellfire will rain upon you when you have an outage due to a poorly planned improvement.
In my case, our worst case was revenue loss for our customers. In Boeing’s, their worst case is a terrifying death for hundreds of people.
The picture here is that Boeing have been deeply irresponsible, and have let their short term goals compromise their long term stability, the quality of their product, and have forgone their duty of care.
Vital to whom? Certainly not to venture capital nor to shareholders, because I see a real dearth of corporations acting with integrity, especially tech bigcos
As far as VCs and investors are concerned, I have seen all sides of that coin. There definitely are VCs and investors who are always and only out for a quick buck and others who think long-term, act with integrity and respond positively to it in others. In my experience the more you can surround yourselves with the second type the better your life will be, although as a public company, Boeing doesn't have that much opportunity to pick its investors.
Starting with the design goals of the 737 Max, continuing with penny pinching during the implementation, then bullying and lying during the certification process, then further bullying during the sales and training process, then massive amounts of blame shifting after the first crash, trying to pin it on the airlines and the pilots, then repeating the same thing after the second crash, then not providing documentation and data during the investigation, then further trying to get away with half baked fixes, then bullying the FAA to try and allow the Maxes to fly well before they were ready, etc.
At every stage of the process Boeing has led with lies and bullying. There is absolutely no reason to give them the slightest of the benefit of the doubt.
For every action, the best approach is probably to consider what would be the worst thing Boeing could have done as a response, because that’s likely what they did.
If Boeing wanted to be responsive to those customers they could have produced a plane that didn’t need additional training.
> If Boeing wanted to be responsive to those customers they
> could have produced a plane that didn’t need additional training.
There was no way to create such an efficient aircraft on the 737 airframe without requiring pilot training, even if software could smooth over the differences 99% of the time.
It is a simple fact that training is part of the total cost of ownership of an airplane, and so it is to be expected that it will be an issue in negotiating the price an airline is willing to pay for them, or whether to go with a different airplane.
In a responsible or well-regulated industry, responding to these sorts of issues (which are ubiquitous), through a reduction of safety standards, is supposed to be off the table. What Boeing was doing here was apparently part of a larger campaign to subvert this principle by hiding any hint of a safety concern.