Originally published at: Boeing CEO admits "mistake" after latest 737 MAX incident - Boing Boing
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Spot the mistake in the headline and first paragraph.
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I was getting genuinely confused. Was it a mistake from Boeing? Or from BoingBoing?
…BoeingBoeing?
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Fruday, a day that started out like any other Friday, but you were soon to rue the choice you made.
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Here’s “Legacy Rot” again (cf Hewlett Packard, Intel, Fluke, most media outlets, movie studios etc). Boeing was once an engineering driven powerhouse of innovation. Then McDonnell Douglas bought it in 1997 and it’s been an anti-union profit squeezing endeavor from then on. Really small wonder for all these “just add another bodge-up to the 737 and loosely bolt on a ‘max’ to the name”. Can no capitalist break-through survive beyond the first generation, or the first merger? (“well there’s Apple…” “What? you’re kidding me!” [slap-fight])
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So, the cockpit door was ripped from it’s frame during the decompression … that isn’t getting much attention.
There are panels on the door that are SUPPOSED to give way in an incident like this, same as on many other aircraft. The idea is to keep the door in place (terrorism) even with a hole in the plane.
In this case, the door frame itself was designed to give way - much to the surprise of pilots everywhere. And yet another feature/bug of the 747 that wasn’t disclosed in the owner’s manual.
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“None of the 177 people aboard were hurt.”…WTF?! Way to downplay the emotional impact of that event. That 15-year-old boy who was nearly sucked out of the plane is probably scarred for life! Sheesh!
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As the mother of a nearly 15 year old boy, my heart absolutely aches for that boy and his mom. They will both have PTSD from this “accident”. 
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Well, short of somehow trying to blame the airline Boeing was always going to have to admit some fault, but it’s definitely less damaging for them to say “some knuckleheads on the shop floor put this together wrong” than it is for them to admit to a fundamental design flaw or poor engineering. But of course those things are related. Well-engineered designs are difficult or impossible to assemble incorrectly. Toyota pioneered a design philosophy called “poka-yoke” that makes it much more difficult for workers to make mistakes during assembly. And of course for aircraft manufacturing there should always be multiple redundant checks to ensure that things are built right.
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Dave Calhoun, CEO.
Per Wiki:
In 2020, Boeing had a historically bad year, reporting a $12 billion loss and laying off 30,000 workers. At the same time, Calhoun earned $21.1 million in compensation.
In a March 2020 interview with The New York Times , Calhoun discussed the 737 MAX’s MCAS software, saying the Boeing had made a “fatal mistake” in expecting that pilots could immediately correct the software problems. He went on to explain that “pilots [in Ethiopia and Indonesia] don’t have anywhere near the experience that they have here in the U.S.”; he unsuccessfully requested to go off the record after being asked whether American pilots would have been able to control the situation, and then replied, “[f]orget it, you can guess the answer.”
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I wonder how much of this willingness to admit fault has to do with the fact that this time, thankfully, no one actually died.
Ever since this whole MAX aircraft thing began, I keep thinking of the dude who lived in my neighborhood who worked at Pratt & Whitney. When he wasn’t complaining about taxes or minorities, he’d kvetch about how things just aren’t made the same anymore, and had a “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going!” sticker on his pickup.
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I’ve read elsewhere that this is due to the change in the company being driven by MBAs rather than engineers. Less worrying about making a good product and instead making sure they have a good profit. Considering that even BoingBoing’s reporting mentions the stock hit as if that really matters from a safety perspective, I’m not sure we’ll escape this impossible grind to always make more money. I’ve been at multiple companies that have made millions or billions YOY and yet still say it was a bad year and let people go.
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Rob called the planes 727 Max in his first story on this crash, so now he’s switching to 747. It averages out to 737. It’s as accurate as boeing is with their specs; maybe he likes the details of his stories to reflect the subject. 
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So, white supremacist on top of general asshole?
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This didn’t age well, 2017: (On FB, so I can’t grab it directly.)
The child you hold in your arms today is the dreamer of tomorrow. The Boeing Company proudly supports
Or the child in your arms might get sucked out in depressurization, if you didn’t hang on while also grabbing your mask.
They’re now recommending buying a seat, and using a strapped-in child seat, just in case.
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Next story it’ll be a DeHavilland Boeing DC-10.
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Makes me NUTS. If you’re going to present yourself as a journalist, can you at least get the type of aircraft correct??? Kinda makes me wonder if I should pay attention to anything else in the ‘article’.
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I think they had about 10 seconds to disconnect the trim stabilizer, after that the forces to manually trim were too great. When a machine is trying to kill you, sometimes the machine wins.
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