How the Boeing 737 MAX Disaster Looks to a Software Developer (2019)

>I’ll say it again: In the 737 Max, the engine nacelles themselves can, at high angles of attack, work as a wing and produce lift. And the lift they produce is well ahead of the wing’s center of lift, meaning the nacelles will cause the 737 Max at a high angle of attack to go to a higher angle of attack. This is aerodynamic malpractice of the worst kind.

how does this even pass basic design QA in the first place? or modeling simulations? adding a kludgey software solution to a fundamentally broken airplane design is, of course, going to introduce huge amounts of risk

>MCAS was the way for both Boeing and its customers to keep the money flowing in the right direction.

and there it is - the MBA-brained enshittification of everything

> As airplanes became more complex and the gulf between what the FAA could pay and what an aircraft manufacturer could pay grew larger, more and more of those engineers migrated from the public to the private sector. Soon the FAA had no in-house ability to determine if a particular airplane’s design and manufacture were safe. So the FAA said to the airplane manufacturers, “Why don’t you just have your people tell us if your designs are safe?” The airplane manufacturers said, “Sounds good to us.”

you're telling me deregulation (ie removing the lowest bar for standards) leads to worse safety and overall shittier products? incredible

I suspect Boeing will 'learn their lesson from this one' and then less than a decade later, with enough shareholder pressure, fall back on the same sword that it did this time around