The Boeing CEO exited the company with just 60 million dollars, which is a lot like being sent to prison.
The 737 MAX was a failure of process, not by specific choices made by a leader - he was fired however for his poor response to the crashes, he committed many tactical and PR errors, which made the restoration process longer than it should have been.
If still you want to lay blame at any single persons feet, lay the blame at the feet of James McNerney, the CEO who ran Boeing while the bulk of the development of the MAX was done, he's the one who kicked the MAX program off.
Airbus absolutely uses its fly-by-wire system to change the handling characteristics of its airplanes, to make them fly the same - I see no reason why Boeing couldn't do the same thing.
And I argue the opposite: it can‘t be made to behave exactly the same as soon as the failure scenarios are considered.
In computer speak, you just look from the point of view of a “most common” run, not all the special cases, exceptions etc.
There are other impossibilities too, directly related to the certification requirements, already documented in the news articles before.
Wait to see what the final opinion of European agencies are once the latest changes are evaluated and you’ll see that it’s not the same plane, even if Boeing all the time bent over backwards over the dead bodies of others.
AFAIK, being on the same type rating means the A320neo has the same behaviour as the A320ceo _even when in direct law_, where there's a 1:1 mapping between input and behaviour. (Yet alone the very limited mechanical fallback!)
The purpose of the MCAS is to make the aircraft certifiable - full stop. The MAX is dynamically unstable, in the sense that at high angles of attack it will tend to continue increasing AOA into a stall - a terrible airframe sin which they tried to fix in software. This is the real story, not this type rating stuff.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19695757
As a pilot and former CFI, without any question whatsoever, a pilot must know how the airplane behaves near stall. Student pilots have demonstrated certified pilot level competency of their particular make/model aircraft stall behavior, before any CFI feels comfortable doing a student pilot sign off for solo flight. It's that goddamn basic.
And 737 MAX airplanes have two such stall behaviors, with MCAS and without (via stabilizer trim cutoff). I'd like to see every Boeing pilot involved in these decisions put on a hot seat and asked if they really think it's appropriate to sign off a pilot, as competent to fly, when they aren't completely aware of two different stall behaviors for this aircraft.
In my opinion it's unconscionable to have deprived pilots of this knowledge. I am aware of the make/model type certificate arguments. As yet no authority has said for sure whether MCAS knowledge requirements would have then required a new type certificate, or if in fact MCAS is improperly papering over an airworthiness deficiency.
What we do know is, it's damn suspicious that this make/model has been grounded this long, with multiple supposedly official statements that software fixes are done and tested and should be ready for FAA approval and deployment any day now, and yet that's been postponed at least 3 times that I'm aware of. If this is strictly a software fix, and a mere tweak back to the original basis of certification, why all the delays?
So they use SAFe Agile at Boeing, too?
The truly fatal decision though was made in 2016 when Muilenberg was CEO. That decision was to make MCAS a single sensor system vs. a two sensor system. Originally, MCAS would activate based on a combination of a G sensor and the AoA sensor. Sometime in the middle of 2016, when they did flight testing, they found that the undesirable handling characteristics could manifest without high G, so they took the G sensor out of the mix. In order to account for the low-speed, low-g handling problem, they also had to make the MCAS corrections be much more powerful, which made it much more dangerous. The FAA apparently wasn't informed of this.
This key moment was approximately one year into Muilenberg's tenure, and so the buck has to stop with him. Muilenberg was also CEO after the Lion Air crash, and he's responsible for the decision not to ground the fleet at that time. He's also responsible for not wanting to ground the fleet after the second crash, and pressuring the FAA to quickly certify a fix.
isn't the whole problem here that the program wasn't ready for flight?
We're not talking about "calculated" deaths like the ones VW's CEO hopefully goes to prison for. Rather directly attributable ones like the 737MAX or GM's faulty ignition switch scandals.
Given that Boeing and GM are/were some of the most powerful in the US stands to reason that most companies will fall under the "less powerful" characterization. But I think my point was clear already: the more powerful the company, the more clout they have when it comes to keeping their CEOs out of prison. whether or not this is doable for smaller players is irrelevant when talking about a heavyweight like Boeing.
Then I'm sure you also noticed none of this makes my point* less valid. Despite the wave of downvotes (which are probably aimed at me explicitly mentioning the US) I can't see any rebuttal of something I actually said:
*Given the precedents (like the GM scandal), CEOs of big/powerful companies (Boeing) in the US (where Boeing "lives") will pretty much get away with anything, including knowingly allowing hundreds to die (which Boeing/CEO did).
Later edit:
> simply trying to lockup CEOs I don't think is the right way to go.
Indeed, it's just a good first step. The very same companies and CEOs will always fight any legal changes that would further a culture of safety first because that usually hurts the bottom line.
But you don’t have a single example of less powerful executives going to prison in situations comparable to the one we’re discussing, right?
In Brazil Vale and a number of its executives (along with the European dam inspector) are expected to be indicted. It will like be about falsifying documents related to dam safety.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vale-sa-disaster-exclusiv...
Proving that the CEO is the one that should go to jail, while satisfying, is actually quite difficult. While I would probably agree with one piece of your sentiment, senior executives are often able to escape prosecution for things that are clearly illegal (looking at you HSBC), simply trying to lockup CEOs I don't think is the right way to go.