Hacker News Reader

Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

The breakdown came from trying to crush their engineering organization for costing too much/being unionized — and particularly firing the mid-career engineers, who would by now be the missing senior/principal engineers.

MCAS is a reflection of their systems integration engineers not being the caliber and experience they need: it was obviously a defective design.

View on HN

Not to mention that it was a fraud to begin with, trying to skirt pilot-training rules by having (monumentally incompetent) software tweak the controls of a perverted airframe design to make it imitate previous 737s.

If they had done what they needed to do and designed a new plane from scratch, those people wouldn't be dead.

OR if they'd simply acknowledged the changed characteristics of the plane, struck deals with purchasers to subsidize training expenses, and let pilots fly it themselves... those people wouldn't be dead.

Boeing's recent behavior, as reported by this article, warrants further disgust and ought to be featured in the mainstream news.

If they had designed a new plane from scratch, those people wouldn't have died because the new airframe wouldn't have been flying yet. Check back again in 2030.

Still a win.

Tell me, what is the exact number of dead children you're willing to accept in order to get new planes flying?

Just like the optimal amount of fraud is nonzero (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...), the optimal number of dead children is too. A child doesn't have a meaningfully greater chance of dying on an airplane than an adult, so what this question is really asking (while crudely attempting to tug on the heartstrings) is whether we're willing to tolerate people dying in order to keep planes flying. The answer is obviously yes. We don't cancel all flights globally when a plane crashes and everyone dies, because we suddenly can't tolerate the risk anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com