Pointing to Dennis as a failure of an "engineering CEO" because of the MAX incident isn't accurate.
According to the Seattle Times [0], it was in 2016 that MCAS was made more powerful and it was determined that a 10-second reaction time would be required to avoid catastrophe. In that year, in spite of the fact that they changed MCAS, they did not submit the new hazard assessment documents to the FAA. That article also seems to indicate that it was after 2016 that they scrubbed all references to MCAS from the manual.
[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/inspe...
You might assume that this was after the first test flight (also 2016), and that the lead engineer on the system decided to increase the lift MCAS applies after a real-world test. Would they run that by the CEO? Surely not. Was the MCAS system already approved before Dennis? Yea. Would Dennis take a massive risk by cancelling a 6 year project as he became CEO? Definitely. He's between a rock and a hard place. I can't see that he's at fault.
The people who are at fault are the ones who green lit. IIRC, that was an MBA CEO, obviously in tandem with an engineering team who came up with the idea.
You're inventing a false dichotomy here. The problem with MCAS was not that it was approved at all, the problem was that it was scrubbed from the documentation and that the company decided to not train pilots on it. The 10 second reaction time would be plenty if the pilots had a mental model for what the hell was happening, but they didn't because Boeing decided to skip training on it and pretend that flying the Max 8 was the same as flying any of the older models.
Muilenburg was in the driver's seat during the interval between first test flight and FAA approval. He was in the driver's seat when the first plane was delivered. He was in the driver's seat when the first crash happened. He was in the driver's seat when the second crash happened. We can speculate about whether or not he was looped in on any one of the decisions that led here, but it was ultimately his responsbility to be looped in where needed and to set expectations for how Boeing was run.
I get that there's a strong desire among engineers on HN to believe that "our people" wouldn't let things like this happen, but you're going to great speculative lengths to place the blame on MBAs when the simpler answer is that an engineer as CEO actually did allow this to happen and then, when pressed, repeatedly refused to acknowledge that Boeing screwed up [0].
To be clear, I'm not saying this to vilify Muilenburg, I'm simply saying that the narrative that this is a question of McDonnell Douglas MBAs vs old-school Boeing engineers is wrong. The system is much more complicated than that, and people who place the blame on MBAs are projecting their own career frustrations, not rationally analyzing the facts.
[0] https://www.c-span.org/video/?460231-1/boeing-shareholders-m...
> Muilenburg held numerous management and engineering positions on various Boeing programs, including the X-32 (Boeing's entry in the Joint Strike Fighter competition); Boeing's participation in the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor fighter; the YAL-1 747 Airborne Laser; the High Speed Civil Transport; and the Condor unmanned reconnaissance aircraft. He was later vice president of the Boeing combat systems division and program manager for the Army Future Combat Systems program.[10] Muilenburg was president and chief executive officer of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, later renamed Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS), from September 2009 to 2015.
> In December 2013, Muilenburg became the president of Boeing.