81–90 of 234 posts
> Why did Boeing buy McDonnell-Douglas? Because the airplane manufacturing industry is consolidating, and Boeing is pursuing profit at the expense of human lives. Was it really necessary to add the second part to explain why the merger occured? 'industry is consolidating' seems reason enough. The mixing of explanation with moralism in every sentence is grating. Put the moralism and ethics in it's own paragraph so we…
Has anyone considered that the MCAS bug was just simply nasty and difficult to detect in their simulator? It’s easy to look back with retrospect and make sweeping judgements about the entire company and the FAA. But fundamentally this was all over, as the author mentions, a single software bug and a lack of backup sensors to offset the risk. In addition it was the technical pilots who asked for the stick to be harder…
It also relied on a the pilot as a critical control - which is why there was no real automated backup or redundancy. Not unreasonable, doing stab trim cutout is a memory item for most operating manuals - pilots were already the circuit breaker for other stab trim issues. Automation working - great. Maintenance failures? Provide error messages (which occured here). Maintenance issues not resolved and automation misbeh…
As you'll find in this article below, Boeing specifically removed the yoke-back function, which is the natural pilot input to nose up the plane. They also specifically for the MAX removed the separate switch for automatic stab trim assistance, so you have to turn off the motorized function entirely to turn off automated inputs including MCAS. The Lion Air crew could be heard on the radio saying that they did disable the stab trim, but in this situation the force required on the manual trim wheel was beyond the pilots' strength. The pilots turned the electronic stab trim back on in hopes of using the powered system to get back up, after which the undocumented and unstoppable MCAS nosed down the plane again, killing them and their passengers.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
Your post reads like a sophisticated attempt to blame the victims, or at least the pilots and ground crews of the victims. These crashes were not caused by poor pilots, but rather secrets on top of secrets, all by Boeing, all for money.
The MAX had new aerodynamic characteristics, but that needed to be a secret.
So MCAS was added to the electronic trim assistance to hide the new characteristics, and the switch to disable it was removed to protect the secret.
A faulty AOA sensor was now able to bring down the plane, but in order to keep the secret the single AOA option was still available and sold. Maintenance crews regardless of quality would not have been aware of the criticality of the AOA's secret role as a single point of failure for the whole plane.
When the first one crashed, secrets covered it up.
When the second one crashed, it still took all of those "ppor maintenance", "broad quality" non-US airlines and regulators to bring a stop to it.
And apparently the secret-keepers are still trying to hide.
Please don't blame dead pilots for this.
> Why did Boeing buy McDonnell-Douglas? Because the airplane manufacturing industry is consolidating, and Boeing is pursuing profit at the expense of human lives. Was it really necessary to add the second part to explain why the merger occured? 'industry is consolidating' seems reason enough. The mixing of explanation with moralism in every sentence is grating. Put the moralism and ethics in it's own paragraph so we…
When you are in senior management, you make decisions based on their overall effect on the company's financial health or future growth. That is your job, just like it is the engineer's job to make decisions based on overall safety and reliability or future capability.
The debate, or perhaps the proof, is what happens next. Every decision, engineering or management, needs to be evaluated post implementation to evaluate its effectiveness. Are we better off financially? Are we more capable? Is this system more reliable? Is this system easier to change while continuing to validate it is meeting its design goals?
Both management and engineering resist having their decisions "colored" by their negative impact from the "other" group. Engineers don't like it when their clearly correct decision is overridden by management's feeling it doesn't make "business" sense (which is usually code for it reduces margins unacceptably). And management doesn't like it when their decision is negated by engineering telling them it will cause their products to become unacceptably unreliable or unsafe.
In a properly functioning company it is the role of executive management to combine both the needs of engineering and the needs of the business into an effective outcome that everyone can live with and keeps the company alive.
Articles on the acquisition suggest that Boeing acquired MD both because the industry was consolidating and because MD was making more money per plane than Boeing was. They wanted both the customer base of MD and the "DNA" or managerial understanding of how to build planes that were more profitable. Here in hindsight the implication is that the additional profit margin came from skimping on safety and reliability engineering.
At some point, there was no doubt a review on the 737-MAX, where the engineering teams raised concerns about MCAS and the impact on safety and reliability. And the costs associated with addressing those concerns were also discussed, both cost to implement and time to market costs. The result of that review was to pursue certification on their plan of record and to not incur the additional certification and time to market costs that engineering advocated were needed.
That decision was explicitly the pursuit of profit margin at the expense of product safety and reliability. As human lives are transitively related to safety and reliability of the aircraft, it is a reasonable statement to make about pursuing profit at the expense of human lives. That is what the equations reduce to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol no we don't. The richest 1% of Americans own 50% of the stocks. The top 10% of Americans own 84% of the stocks.
Is it really true that all the pension funds in USA - let alone all the foreigners (rich and poor) - together own only 16% of the shares in USA listed public companies. I call BS.
In addition, much of pension funds go into public bonds and real estate investment trusts, not the stock market anyway.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/01/fact-checking-gary-cohns-cla...
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/credit-loans-mortgages...
Can someone explain to me how this is possible? In my understanding If you move the engines forward, it would move the center of gravity forward as well, and this would push the tail up and pull the nose down - exactly the opposite from what's written in the article. Does some fancy aerodynamic effect play some role here that leads to stalling?
> In the case of information technology-related manufacturing, research, development, and marketing are the most profitable areas to specialize. Fabricating the units and linking critical components is a low-margin race to the bottom. Inspired by this theory, companies like Boeing aim to specialize in high-margin activities and outsource the rest. This is the core point which the author seems to be trying to make, th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So why not elect good CEOs? Why do we have to let the wall street hacks pick our CEOs?
Or just different CEO's? How about fundamentally different CEO's?
Note two contradictory popular trends: 1. AI is going to replace cheap labor 2. Engineering companies are outsourcing because of cheap labor The reality is that trend #2 is orders of magnitude larger. Any reversal of that by ‘AI’ would be the biggest jobs boom in decades for western nations, and according to this article, would increase quality and therefore trade balance as well. The other reality is that manufactur…
That reminds me of an article I read about the new Toyota Supra and Toyota & BMW's collaboration to create it and (either the Z4 or an M-car? Sorry, I don't remember). Anywho, the thing that was interesting to me was how much Toyota and BMW were willing to invest in what is more or less an engineer's bootcamp- like baseball teams playing out-of-league teams in practice to get better- and that that was seen as a worth…
Note two contradictory popular trends: 1. AI is going to replace cheap labor 2. Engineering companies are outsourcing because of cheap labor The reality is that trend #2 is orders of magnitude larger. Any reversal of that by ‘AI’ would be the biggest jobs boom in decades for western nations, and according to this article, would increase quality and therefore trade balance as well. The other reality is that manufactur…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Boeing is pursuing profit at the expense of human lives To play devil's advocate, this isn't a moral statement. The author is saying this is true based on actual events.
I'm almost certain "expense of human lives" didn't come up as a factor on any of the merger pitch decks. Frankly its a huge leap to see that a merger of two successful and relatively safe aircraft manufacturers would be intentionally at the expense of human lives.
Is that not pursuing profit at the expense of human lives?