Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief
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I don’t believe a single incident is equivalent in this case to what happened to the MAX platform, to much has gone wrong
Which, again, if you go in open-eyed can be fine.
Any technically competent CSO knows they are totally screwed even if they implement everything feasible perfectly (i.e. no inane solution like shutting down the whole company). It is not a problem of resources or commitment (though you could also have those problems), it is a problem of impossibility due to the incompetence of commercial IT cybersecurity processes.
The only way to survive in a environment where you literally can not do what you were ostensibly hired to do is to lie and take the fall. The only other alternative is being too stupid to realize you are screwed, but every bank cybersecurity executive team I’ve ever met knew that someone could go in and steal all of their documents for less than 1 million dollars (you could also change things, but the out of band cross-checking makes that hard without intimate knowledge of the specific financial checks, more a question of knowing how banks work than hacking, the 1 M$ gives you full access rights, but you need to be careful not the drive the tank through the wall of the general’s office).
Many security leaders (CISOs or otherwise) do not have the budget or authority to meet their board's or CEO's expectations, but it may be outside your sample of big banks.
I'm otherwise aligned with your comment. The successful CISOs I've interacted with, regardless of industry, educate their leadership team on the trade-offs and risks of investment levels, set realistic response and recovery times expectations based on those investments, and turn it into a business decision, rather than promising the impossible.
I said CISOs are uniformly incompetent at cybersecurity. No matter how many resources they are provided they are uniformly incapable of delivering security acceptable to the business customers, shareholders, and stakeholders.
There are exactly zero universes in which it is acceptable for a bank to be thoroughly compromised for 1 M$. If they wrote the truth in their advertising and investor documents there would be calls for blood. It is the job of the security organization to make sure the CEO is not aware of the truth so that the CEO can continue safely making statements palatable to the stakeholders.
This is not a problem that can be solved by the current actors through increased resources, effort, or focus. They have demonstrated they are incapable of achieving minimally acceptable outcomes across the entire range in every field. There are no gold standards to point to, no paragons to emulate, just piles of crap littering the wasteland. Meaningful security will not be attained until we throw away all of the commercial IT garbage and build things on the various high robustness systems designed and verified to protect against professional and state actors.
Breaches can happen for many reasons, from we do not give a fuck to everyone knows and have accepted the situation.
The job of the CSO is to bring things on the table even when they are not nice to hear, provide a solution and recommend priorities.
When well documented it is a good bottom protector.
Voyager's ablative generator also provided regenerative capability so it didn't need a space dock to repair heavy damage.
As a friend of mine put it:
Everyone’s best warships are in a dead heat with a luxury liner full of nerds that happens to have guns on it.
Starfleet ships didn’t need armor. Their materials science was already so advanced, they had to use structural integrity and dampening fields to push beyond what existing physical materials could accomplish.
So when they roll out an actual warship using physical armor plating, it is an incredible advancement in materials beyond “simple” energy-reinforced hulls.
Alternatively, it’s really boring technology but the idea of a Starfleet warship is so new they are salivating over things everyone else has been using for centuries. It’s like giving a tank to a soccer mom and telling her to have fun in traffic.
> However, a person familiar with the decision and who asked not to be identified commenting on sensitive personnel decisions, confirmed that Clark’s leaving was not voluntary.
> Clark is an engineer. His successor Ringgold has business degrees. However she began her aviation career performing avionics systems maintenance and troubleshooting on C-130 aircraft in the United States Air Force.
As usual, it IS a system’s issue. It’s an incentive issue. If the people that made decisions were incentivised to prioritise long-term stability and performance, they would. They aren’t, and the reason they aren’t isn’t solved with a swift “get rid of them all”. You think that these big scary business people you demonise don’t themselves have KPIs? The pressure of corporate America, of short-term returns, is still going to be there. Have you seen how drastically the average shareholding lifespan has dropped over the last 10 years? Businesses are just operating in more of an environment where long-term stability and even growth don’t matter.
Boeing is such an easy target. It’s very easy to just lazily say “Boeing is rotten!” and leave it at that, because then you get to pretend that the solution is easier than it is. Whilst there are definitely Boeing-specific circumstances that heavily heavily contribute, the reality is that Boeing has had few chances to ‘innovate’ in recent memory, especially with its new makeup. This is just what it looks like when they do. The reality is that this is merely a reflection of how the wider world works. And that’s the thing with systems problems. It’s intellectually dishonest to just sit back and “blame MBAs”. These sorts of problems fester in the wiring and the mechanics, with unpredictable consequences that are almost impossible to reverse by the time they’re realised.
The wheels were set in motion before the Boeing merger. It wasn’t a trigger, it was a consequence. Similarly, some “MBAs” making decisions, either with Boeing or investors, were themselves not the trigger. Fate had already been decided several layers up the stack when personal and organisational incentives were set as they are in the first place.
>The MO of ‘business people’ isn’t inherently ‘quick wins, bleed the company dry’.
It absolutely is the model, because humans gotta human.
I assure you that Engineers with knowledge of the products are rarely included in steering meetings, and when they are, they are window dressing.
I know this because I'm an expert in my field and over 3+ decades, this is pretty much exactly how technical people get handled when it comes to meetings and decisions.
Guess who occupies most of the C-suite. Do you think it's engineers? No, its MBAs.
MBAs are NOT the source of all things bad, but lets not break our arms jerking them off over the "great work" they've done.
smh.
1. Engineering incompetence.
2. Mgmt pressure.
3. Engineering failure. As in legitimately attempted, but missed the mark.
Considering how this company has operated, for decades, it's fairly simple to point to Option 2 as the most likely culprit. Option 1 is possible, but unlikely, since there are a number of engineers involved. Option 3 is also possible and could still be the issue, but if we were betting, it would be option 2, because they've already proven, that's who they are.
Shareholders are more than willing to reward the relevant executives for cutting spending, but they rarely hold the same people who made those cuts for issues stemming as a consequence of the aforementioned cuts.
As the saying goes, “you can’t test quality into a product.”
But that also seems like splitting hairs. The problem is not one of engineering design, to OP's post.
If cars are leaving the factory without brakes on, you shouldn't start firing engineers for designing a car that's possible to build without brakes.
Why this happened? Massive cost cuts ordered by management, which led to cut corners, or cut trainings, or both. If ing. Or MBA is irrelevant. If I have to guess, I would point to an MBA
Why did this action take _this_ long for this to happen? To me it says they were burying their heads in the sand hoping things would blow over.
I'll believe Boeing if they turn a new leaf and prioritize engineering over marketing and being number one in aircraft deliveries in the short-term at the cost of long-term viability.
Mmmmm, there was a delicious "Under-Bus-Throw Contest" in the wake of the MCAS fiasco, centered around their chief technical test pilot, Mark Forkner.
Keep in mind that half of this is anecdotal, but the sequence of events was something like this. Crap goes down, Forkner gets canned. He leaks documents, and wow, that was super bad. Now something curious happens, more docs get leaked - from <s>who knows where</s> - showing that Forkner was a bit of a burnt out cynical a-hole[1]. Now, imagine those chats going to the media - it would make that person seem like the real villain, yes? The DOJ thought so too, so the leak brought criminal fraud charges on Forkner. After that, even worse documents were leaked - probably from Forkner or his attorney's people - and the charges get walked back, because it's insanely obvious that whatever fraud he might have been committing was done at the behest of his masters. A colossal cock up, part of the bigger cock up that was the PR blitz following the MCAS crashes, which was itself a subset of the Ubersturmbanfuhrer Cockup of the MCAS fiasco. It's cockups all the way up.
In this tit for tat, the only one with the bomb craters showing was Boeing's rep, because, let's be honest here, at the end of the day even if Forkner was a horrible asshole he was still Boeing's representative to the goddamn flying world.
Terribly calculated, terribly executed, terrible results. A masterclass in how not to do public relations and, failing that, dirty tricks campaigns.
[1] You know the type. The guy who always ends each IM with some quip about what crap your company is making and how he feels like a con artist. His soul, hollow and shrivelled from all the sucking sounds, tends to kick cats and hiss at dogs. Leak that to the media, see who the villain is now.
(I'm not optimistic about Boeing here, but hey.)
So true ... Jack Welch was an engineer.
That's a funny way of spelling "Self-entitled jackass, who would spit on his own mother for a nickel", but I'll accept it.
Edit: I guess the DVs are just ignorant idiots. here is just one example of how stellar of a guy ole Jack was:
Under Welch's leadership, GE waged a twenty-year battle with the Environmental Protection Agency and New York State over polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that the company dumped into the Hudson River at its capacitor products division plant in Hudson Falls, New York.
Inflammatory? What else do you call a clown that would spit on his own mother for a nickel?
Point taken, but FFS. The man was a grand mal asshole and that should be mentioned every time his name appears.
Every single time assholes are mentioned, their assholery should be mentioned too. Let's not rewrite history for those unaware of how these "people" acted.
By your logic, the only thing that should be mentioned about Pol Pot is that he was a leader of Cambodia at one point.
Talking about this is doing a serious service.
This is free, and the simple fact of Jack being a grand mal jackass is relevant.
Quite rare.
Sometimes, it’s about PR.
And culture, they haven’t changed. Boeing is still firing engineers, appointing MBAs, getting paid by politicians, and hiring on the revolving doors of local prisons. I wouldn’t even trust a burger flipped by this bunch. Boeing factories also need to move to other states before we trust them again.
I’m not for one second saying that Boeing hasn’t been seriously mismanaged. The whole debacle has just inexplicably been some sort of lightning rod for people that want to flex their self-identified nerd cred by saying “ENGINEER GOOD BUSINESS BAD!”
Interesting that she spent a few years in Belize after getting out of the Air Force. This is the description of her MOS: http://www.mosdb.com/air-force/2A133/mos/1559/
I don't think you're being all that fair here. I have no idea whether she's going to do a good job or not, but there's more to a person than the degree they got. Former military getting business degrees is pretty common and often the only reason is they were the most likely program to offer distance learning and night class options back in 2001. I'll say, as an engineer with a CS degree who is also a former commissioned officer, former military can be hit and miss, but in many ways I'd be more confident going with prior enlisted who got a degree via the GI Bill than other commissioned officers. There can be a tendency with the way we get trained in the military to become serious yes men. You never say no to a commander and you always attempt to accomplish any mission without question, no matter how ludicrous or impossible it is. That makes sense in wartime but not in business and many do not understand that or know how to turn off that attitude.
Prior enlisted, however, are usually not that fanatical about pleasing superiors. Their rating and promotion process is a lot saner and they tend to be more aligned and care more about the career field they were in. In her case, you can see this involved ensuring and maintaining the quality of aircraft comms and nav systems. That's probably not a bad place to come from. I was a tank commander back in the day myself, and I can say there was nobody who cared more that the tanks were reliable and safe than the career enlisted tank crewmen and tank mechanics. I would trust them with my life way before I would trust a career engineer who had never served on or with a crew.
Part of the problem is also that airlines have been very good at squeezing the duopoly while demanding ever more. The competition, if it manages to get a plane in the air, usually isn’t as fuel efficient and so the airlines have mostly not been interested.
To be fair, that's because Boeing forced them to sell the rights to the A220 for $1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...
The USITC reversed their own decision a year or so later, and Boeing chose to not appeal the decision, but Bombardier and Canada ended up deciding to not pursue things further.
Russia might certify it unless having a viable domestic alternative. Moreover, it could reuse parts for its own planes.
These three taken together are already a significant chunk of the global market, each having a large domestic demand.
The problem with Tu-204 is that it wasn't a good market fit, like the current Chinese ARJ. It was certified OK and could fly abroad all right.
People said the same about Chinese cars and they're the largest exporter in 2023.
What if they have not one but ten generic passenger plane brands by 2040?
They demonstrated localized version of SSJ-100 with PD-8 engine in 2023. I'm not sure if it actually flew, but there were at least ground tests of the fully assembled aircraft.
I much rather fly in an E195 E2 than a 737 or A320 Neo. Really next level. KLM has these, unfortunately they rarely use them to my destination because they can fill a 737 to there as well :(
I'm also certain they don't want to.
Boeing is a duopoly with Airbus and for putting in your hands in a brand new Airbus you will have to join the queue and wait five years. So they benefit from the lack of competition, if the merger with McDonnel had never happened, probably this situation would be different. But today's capitalism is all about consolidating and eliminating competition.
Embraer might try to venture in the wide body segment, but they don't seem willing to do that move.
What followed was not necessarily even about cost-cutting - they wanted to spread out the production of their aircraft from centralized locations (easy to QC) to cover as many different congressional districts and reap the maximum amount of political capital.
Google / Doubleclick
Ooo pretty. The person responsible for the self certification failures is getting promoted.
Wasn't the South Carolina site the one that had all the 787 QC issues?
From what I gather, in addition to management prioritizing the wrong things, there has also been the issue of not enough external oversight to hold them accountable for safety.
[1] Seems like consensus at this point is that the repair/rework review process had a hole contractors/suppliers could use to skip reviews by changing a category. Again, that might be done for "MBA" reasons but if the process allowed it it's still a bug in the process.
The problems almost certainly go deeper than engineering. It sounds like there's pressure to cut costs. Still, an engineer has a responsibility to design and build a safe airplane. If the budget prevents that, it's still the engineers' responsibility to make sure that whatever plane they can build is safe or they shouldn't build it. It's a total cop out to put it all on the MBA's when it's layer upon layer of failures that result in a plane as bad as the 737 MAX. Engineers in commercial aviation shouldn't ever be afforded the luxury of pointing the finger at their bosses. Their job above all others is to protect lives by building a good airplane.
This engineer guy was the one that took over after they fired the last one after the 2 crashes...
No engineer, if given the choice, would have re-used the old plane design instead of designing a fully new, modern plane, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.
No engineer, if given the choice, would have put the plane through as little testing as they did or sold it as not requiring much training for pilots, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.
No engineer, if given the choice, would have separated the manufacturing facility out of Boeing, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.
These are decisions that were pushed by higher ups (with MBAs) that engineers have to live with. They aren't "wrong" decisions, there is nothing in them an engineer could look at and say "this will, 100% cause a failure down the road and I demand we not do this". What they are is steps in the wrong direction, steps away from the "best" decision that could have made from a safety and quality standpoint. Take enough and eventually they add up into what happened.
I think the best way I can put it is if, as an engineering org that deals with real world things, you aren't pushing towards best practices, higher standards, and technical excellence than you are either stagnating or declining. In either case your quality will decline without anyone doing anything "wrong" as you end up with people with increasingly less experience and resources being asked to do more work. And the worst part is you can get away with that and often companies do. But if you go to far eventually you cross a threshold where cumulative effects push you over the boundary of failure.
And no engineer would have made the computer ignore one of those two AoA sensors because two isn't enough and now you have a dilemma of which to trust.
And no engineer would have cooked up the cockamamie idea of hiding the new CAS scheme so that they could claim that the new plane was the same type as the previous plane.
And no engineer would have insisted that the new plane was the same type as the previous plane.
And no engineer would have threatened the U.S. Congress with canceling the whole program if they don't get the waivers needed to get the plane flying.
And...
There’s plenty of blame to go around and many people deserve to be fired, but this notion that the engineers should get a free pass because an MBA told them to do it is absurd. Obviously, it was engineers giving assurances they could, in fact, build a safe airplane per requirements. It’s silly to think management would go through with building a plane if the engineers had told them in no uncertain terms that it had fundamental flaws. It’s a big fat fail all around.
Who is at fault if a cars brakes fail? The mechanic that installed them wrong? Or the boss that overworked them, expected them to get more brakes installed for less money every year, didn't give them the proper training to learn how to install the brakes, and hired that mechanic after firing the senior one with more experience because the new mechanic was cheaper?
I don't think the individuals really matter that much here. The point to firing executives in charge of big failures is to incentivize the ones remaining to get their ships under control before another disaster. Clark clearly failed on that front, but again the 737 MAX program isn't the end of Boeing's problems.
Just not this one specific individual.
Shuffling the deck chairs around in the executive lounge at Boeing isn't going to fundamentally change anything.
Leaders should take responsibility for failure, not shuffle it around.
If Boeing were a Japanese company, the CEO would personally be apologizing.
What is your moronic comment based on? experience isnt everything.