I am surprised it takes this long to make someone accountable. But it is too little too late, though a step in the right direction. It is clear that this program was flawed right from the get go.
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.
[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?