Cue the obligatory comment of Boeing is a company with an insanely great engineering culture and their engineers lived in an idyllic culture of building great and safe products. This great culture was all lost as a result of the merger with McDonnell Douglas [1], [2], [3].
Somehow the Boeing apologists want you to think that the unholy trinity of the ghost of McDonnell Douglas through the CEO at the time of the merger Harry C. Stonecipher (the father) and Dennis Muilenburg (the Son) who greenlighted the 737 MAX are responsible for this abomination. So much so that of the thousands of engineers who worked on the 737 Max not a single one raised issues with the engineering of the aircraft or wrote a blistering memo calling out its failing or quit in protest. They were all held in thrall by the power of this unholy trinity!
In the theory of causation, we distinguish between proximate vs. ultimate causality. Every proximate event can plausibly be claimed to be the cause for a subsequent event. As they say for want of a nail the war was lost. What is plausibly the cause for the engineering fiasco of the 737 Max? Why go back to the merger and why not blame the 9/11 or the election of G.W Bush or even Barack Obama's for this disaster? Why go back to the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas? Because it allows Boeing engineers to deflect blame for the terrible product they built and foisted on the flying public by coasting on their past reputations.
Eventually, all stellar organizations, public or private, become complacent (e.g. Israeli Intelligence Failure, 1973). Boeing made an unstable plane with a dangerous MCAS to get it to market fast. They then topped it off by making it rely on a single sensor and made the dual-sensor an upgrade. A sophomore engineering student with a 101 course on probability can see that this is tailor-made for diaster. They made an essential safety feature an upgrade!! They then proceeded to hide this monstrosity from every regulator and airline on the planet and insist that the plane was no different in every aspect of its flight behavior than its predecessor which was over 30 years old.
Boeing had become so criminally blatant that the head of airline training at Lion Air inquired about extra training for the 737 Max and they rebuffed him. After the Lion Air crash, Boeing proceeded to cast aspersion on the safety practices of Lion Air. Lion Air does have a spotty safety record but in this case, Boeing rebuffed their requests for additional training because it would set a precedent for other airlines in SE Asia. When that lack of training was a factor in the crash, Boeing proceeded to blame Lion Air. The mind boggles at the sheer chutzpah!
The recently released messages show how Boeing employees worked in unison to ensure no extra simulator training was required. Great engineering culture obsessed with safety, this aint!
Go ahead and blame the McDonnel Douglas merger for this. Or accept that whatever stellar engineering culture existed at Boeing is dead. We as a society need to stop scapegoating imaginary forces in the past and giving Boeing's engineers a pass. We need to start agreeing that strong regulation is necessary to ensure the safety of the products Boeing puts out.
[1] https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...
[2] https://fortune.com/longform/boeing-737-max-crisis-sharehold...