I meant to say: I’m happy for Boeing engineers and other employees.
I have many friends at Boeing. They are dedicated to making aviation safer, and are the kinds of genuinely passionate airplane geeks who should be running the company. They are not the people who decided that factory work is acceptable even when not properly documented or not meeting QA requirements… or that it’s ok to have an auto-trim system that can overpower the pilots and that can be triggered by a single sensor that has a 1-in-10,000 chance of failure. Yes, many Boeing employees just do what their managers say is acceptable… but many still keep asking “Is this really the right thing to do?”. It’s unfortunate that this second group cannot always keep the first group from creating more holes in the Swiss cheese. So, for the many people at Boeing who are still committed to safety and to integrity - like my friends and ex-coworkers - I’m glad that their company yesterday gave them another reason to be proud of where they work.
(After 14 years as a Boeing engineer, I left about a year after the second MAX crash. I’m still proud of having worked there. I made airplanes safer, more reliable, and more fuel-efficient and less expensive to build - but in ways that do not compromise safety or reliability. I feel very good about the work that I and my coworkers did. I don’t feel like I was part of cutting corners relating to safety; Quite the opposite, if anything. Once, multiple managers really wanted to start using a cheaper manufacturing technology that would have caused airplane parts to maybe not hold up over the years, and I was able to put a stop to that. (The many other new cost-saving technologies that I evaluated were just fine and are now in use). And once, I was overseeing some tests that were being done improperly, and I was able to scrap the tests and convince management to pay to have the test re-built and re-run - properly this time. This is not exceptional, this is what my coworkers and my friends and I did - and still do - day in and day out for our whole careers. Whenever I sign my name to an analysis or test report or maintenance plan or whatever, I remember that if this ever fails in flight, I was the one who said it’s ok, so I better be dang sure. Heck, I could be flying on this airplane in 20 years, so it better actually last that long, with plenty of margin. There are evidently too many pockets of Boeing who no longer maintain that perspective, but I’d bet that most Boeing employees still do. And, yes, Boeing is a corporation, it does whatever it can to maximize shareholder value… but many people there still remember that Boeing is an icon of industry and history, and that lives are at stake, so I still have hope that they will turn things around and persuade their leaders that some things are more important than the bottom line).
