Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

> That's patently absurd, and you know it.

Sure, let's go with the personal attack and the claim of bad faith when we don't like someone's position. (That's against site guidelines, by the way.)

> Employee ownership is not state ownership.

But who gave it to the workers? Who made the current owners give up control? The state. (That's almost certainly still a "taking" within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment. That means "just compensation" for the current owners. Where are you going to get the money?)

> By this logic, the US already has state-owned healthcare, since the government mandates that employers provide health coverage. Do you also believe that the US government is seizing business revenue by requiring that employers pay wages?

Your "logic" here is non-existent. It doesn't follow from my position whatsoever.

> You're just desperate to find a snarl-word...

False. Again the accusation of bad faith.

> you can attach to this obviously reasonable...

Excuse me? Obviously reasonable? I call BS.

> and largely undisruptive plan.

That's quite an assumption there. Or as they say in court: "Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence."

You're mighty free with what you're going to require other people to do with their property. I don't own that much property, but I deny your right to order me to give half of it to those that you think should own it.

There's lots of potential for failure that the planes allow when flying.

Some quick examples - they could have sensors around gas quality but do not - they rely on the folks providing the avgas to have good fuel. They could do built in weight and balance calcs with sensors - they do not, they rely on poor estimates for that. etc.

Boeing in particular ALLOWS pilots to fly planes outside of most flight envelope limits. They do this in part because historically they didn't trust the computer as much and trusted pilots more.

Airbus by contrast doesn't let you do this unless you take air data totally offline or something crazy to force alternative law. I suspect boeing will be moving towards the airbus model which is probably right. Airbus had arguably less local myopia when designing their planes - ie, future pilot populations come from a big group and making the plane as error proof as possible is best. Airbus had some issues around their automation without pilot override initially but I think those are resolved by now.

If you want a scary video - check out this early A320 flying - first fly by wire / autothrottle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAg-WauGrLU

Can't have been a good feeling as that pilot. Note that the A320 is now considered a very safe plane.

Aircraft have evolved from systems with almost no built in redundancy or safety. The design of the 737 is pretty old - 1967 or so. Let that sink in for a bit, consider what type of tech they had back in. This is not a 777 generation plane or even A320.

What would you call the process by which the defense sector designs and builds weapons? This cannot be "engineering" by your definition, as the people involved are not consulted on the foreign policy objectives their work will serve, but it's probably what others in the thread think the word means.

Even in bridge building, the balancing of human civilization's advantages against its environmental cost is a matter of public policy. Engineers may be consulted to assess environmental impact or to provide lower-impact options, but "should we have a bridge here or not" is ultimately a question for political leaders, not engineers.

I believe if you go back and read my comment you'll find I said engineers need to consider the ethical ramifications of their work.

I neither prescribed a particular ethical conclusion nor required consultation for my definition. There are lots of people who choose not to work in Defense because of the ethical considerations. There are others whose personal senses of ethics are not offended by the idea of making weapons, or at least are assuaged by the money. I would argue the same interplay between ethics and compensation is at work in e.g. Facebook and other surveillance firms. Quite obviously some people don't mind working for Facebook, even though I personally would find that repugnant.

What I'm not saying is that someone who works for Facebook "isn't an engineer" because I happen to disagree with their ethical choices. I'm saying that if you call yourself an engineer and you don't consider/ignore the ethical consequences of your work then you are an impostor.

The link to the topic at hand/reason I brought this up is that the 737 MAX issue (or the MCAS issue) isn't a technological problem so much as an ethical problem. Considering the technical faults in isolation ("putting the moralism and ethics in their own paragraph") is deliberately blinding one's self to the crux of the issue.

Didn’t get to read the full article, but it sounds like a case of snakes in suits. Did the leaders and managers in charge at the time the poor engineering took place get any sort of reprimanding or blame, or have they walked away with accolades of their quarterly performance and cost savings with continued increases in salaries and public reputation?