I think they fired the wrong guy here. It should be the head bean counters accounting and all the c-suite that thought safety measures as an optional add-ons purchase was a good idea.
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I used to work there. Boeing pre and post merger was like night and day. The pre-merger approach was more “build the best there is and people will pay for it”. The post-merger was more “We’re the wal-mart of aircraft and so will sell a lot more of them”
There was an exodus of their best and brightest engineers and scientists once they realized this sift. When Alan Mulally was passed over for President and left to head up Ford, the writing was on the wall for everyone, including the public to see.
No one should be surprised by the current situation. It’s been in the works for decades.
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SouthWest made a big issue that if type certification was required for crews transitioning to the MAX, then it could cause logistic issues if an NG was faulty and the crew was not trained for the replacement MAX. And Boeing bent over backwards; as their chief test pilot wrote in a 2017 memo: “I want to stress the importance of holding firm that there will not be any type of simulator training required to transition from NG to MAX. Boeing will not allow that to happen. We’ll go face to face with any regulator who tries to make that a requirement.”
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After Condit resigned in 2003 following an ethics scandal, Boeing’s board convinced former McDonnell Douglas executive Harry Stonecipher to come out of retirement to replace Condit. Stonecipher, a General Electric (GE) alum, immediately set out to change Boeing’s culture, proclaiming, “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it is run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
One of Stonecipher’s fated decisions was to turn down the proposal from Boeing’s head of commercial aviation to design an all-new single-aisle aircraft to replace the Boeing 727 (FAA-certified in 1964), 737 (1968 certification) and 757 (1972). Instead of designing a new airplane incorporating all the advances in aviation technology from the past 30-40 years, Stonecipher elected to maximize profits from older models and use the cash to buy back Boeing stock.
Posted by @hecep in
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The whole MCAS story is so broken. Because Boeing sold it to the FAA as a compliance issue for making the MAX fly like the NG at high speeds, it wasn’t considered a safety critical system that required redundancy.
And even after that, when it turned out during testing that the MAX tended to pitch up at low speeds, the engineers deleted acceleration sensor inputs to the software so it only relied on a single angle of attack sensor and increased the amount of control it had over the horizontal stabiliser - by four times! They weren’t required to let the FAA know about that either.
And somehow it gets worse. MCAS wasn’t mentioned in the few bits of training Boeing supplied; nor were pilots told about procedures for dealing with a runaway stabiliser that had been known about since the Boeing 737-100 flew in the late 1960s.
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I’d be shocked if Ryanair didn’t too. They are also all 737.
I hate them though. Arseholes. Creepy arsehole CEO.
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That’s neoliberalism for ya… Fucks everything up, because the focus is on the next quarter, not on long-term quality. 
We’re fucking our entire planet and civilization over so some dudes can pocket a few extra millions.
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Of course it’s not just a Boeing problem…the entire aviation industry has been on a trajectory of cutting costs at the expense of safety for quite some time now.
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