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Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

reuters.com

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Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#81
Is the CEO being replaced with a competent aerospace engineer who has spent a career focused on safety and excellent design and testing?

> David Calhoun will take over as CEO and president

Ah this is the penny pinching accountant who was involved in the decision to try to avoid recertification to avoid training costs, and with a history of pulling similar stunts at GE which also lead to their troubles.

So, the worst possible man for the job was selected.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#82

> Chairman David Calhoun will take over as CEO and president, effective Jan. 13, the company said, adding that a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the company. If they wanted to restore my confidence, they’d have picked an engineer, not an accountant.

Priorities!

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#83
post #9

November 2019 New Yorker piece about what went wrong at Boeing https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-case-again... tl;dr engineers vs. accountants

BS! Which of these was done by the accountants? 1. Drive MCAS with only one AOA sensor. 2. Don't tell MCAS to look for (or even think about) bad AOA data or AOA disagreements. 3. Don't actually bother to tell pilots that they don't have AOA disagree warning lights. 4. Don't bother to tell pilots that MCAS exists at all. 5. Don't test MCAS subsystem to see what it actually does with bad AOA data. 6. Give MCAS a ridicu…

Your #2 implies multiple sensors (see #1). My understanding is that one AOA is default, and you could purchase additional sensors (I read somewhere that Southwest did).

Sounds like the typical stupid idea suggested by a marketer or accountant that engineers beg and plead not to do.

Frankly, the whole thing reeks of profit at the expense of engineering, safety, and security.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#84
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS! Which of these was done by the accountants? 1. Drive MCAS with only one AOA sensor. 2. Don't tell MCAS to look for (or even think about) bad AOA data or AOA disagreements. 3. Don't actually bother to tell pilots that they don't have AOA disagree warning lights. 4. Don't bother to tell pilots that MCAS exists at all. 5. Don't test MCAS subsystem to see what it actually does with bad AOA data. 6. Give MCAS a ridicu…

The design of the plane was a financially motivated one and lead to the MCAS system being required in the first place. And your note on lack of redundancy and not providing additional training - surely the costs there are obvious?

MCAS wouldn't have been required if they retrained pilots, but that would've made the entire endeavour of re-using the 737 design pointless.

The fact that MCAS was required was not a failure to design a safe plane. Rather it was a failure to make the plane behave like the 737.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#85
post #63

This really doesn't "fix" anything. Mullenberg has been strongly criticized in part because he never accepted the buck stopping with him, didn't clean house, and acted as a mouthpiece, while saying nothing. What people expect from Boeing is a gesture of humanity; an acceptance of culpability. An admission that something went wrong, and a genuine gesture of contrition and change. The company culture needs a wholesale…

The first step of what you're asking for is replacing the CEO, which they just did. Hopefully the rest will follow.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#86
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess it's the following: https://investors.boeing.com/investors/investor-news/press-r... "The Board of Directors decided that a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders. " is quite brutal indeed, more something I'd expect from commentary.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or if this is actually "brutal" in this context (a context I have no experience with)?

An admission of responsibility in a CEO stepping down is incredibly rare. Usually it's phrased as if it is only tangentially related to the matter at hand. As if the CEO had already been planning to leave and this was just a convenient moment for it.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#87

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline... > Safety lapses at the North Charleston plant have drawn the scrutiny of airlines and regulators. Qatar Airways stopped accepting planes from the factory after manufacturing mishaps damaged jets and delayed deliveries. > Less than a month after the crash of the second 737 Max jet, Boeing called North Charleston employees to an urgent meeting. The company…

On the other hand, recently Boeing has made major strides on diversity and inclusion.

>Boeing has made diversity and inclusion a strategic priority — and external validators have taken notice. On May 7, it was announced that Boeing ranked 32nd out of more than 1,800 companies that participated in DiversityInc’s 2019 Top 50 Companies for Diversity survey

>https://www.boeing.com/features/2019/05/diversityinc-top-50-...

#unionssowhite

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#88
post #48
post #11

Why isn't it enough to retrofit all past and future models with enough hardware redundancy and create a properly written MCAS software? Wasn't the design sound, except for the lack of hardware sensor redundancy and naively written software? Why do they need to stop production and so on?

Yes, fixing the MCAS software should solve the problem of the 737 MAX. But with all what happened, authorities are extra thorough before allowing the 737 MAX to fly again. Probably all what is needed is a few more months of patience. On the grand scale of things, the bigger issues with Boeing are how they do business and all the problems with their facturies that have surfaced recently. Beyond getting the 737 MAX to…

> But with all what happened, authorities are extra thorough before allowing the 737 MAX to fly again.

I think this is entirely true, but it's an interesting commentary on the structure of regulation: it's some small part technical investigation, and a much larger part public relations. I can't even argue they're wrong to operate that way, since their mission is to build public trust in air travel, but it produces absurd results in other areas, e.g. airport security theater.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#89

Why don't they just kill the 737 MAX program and start on another aircraft? As a consumer it will build confidence and trust in me.

The 737 Max cost $3bn to develop and it's an iteration of an existing design. There's no "just" about developing an entirely new plane design from scratch.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#90
post #50

Maybe the next CEO will actually try to fix things, seeing as how his job will likely depend on it. Fuck up like Muilenburg did and you're out too. It seems like the incentives may be correct now to focus on the right things rather than just cut costs as much as possible. Hopefully!

I hope you're right but this reminds me of the very sad saying, "Bike lanes are painted in blood". Why can't we properly value safety over convenience and profits before there is a huge accident?

because humans have a biological imperative to choose short term solutions
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