What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

Buying an airplane is not the same as buying a consumer item from a big box retailer.

It's more like buying an expensive car/enterprise software. There are options. Options cost extra....

excerpts from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/business/boeing-safety-fe...:

As the pilots of the doomed Boeing jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia fought to control their planes, they lacked two notable safety features in their cockpits.

One reason: Boeing charged extra for them.

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. Boeing started moving on the software fix and the equipment change before the crash in Ethiopia.

The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy. Neither feature was mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration. All 737 Max jets have been grounded.

“They’re critical, and cost almost nothing for the airlines to install,” said Bjorn Fehrm, an analyst at the aviation consultancy Leeham. “Boeing charges for them because it can. But they’re vital for safety.”

“There are so many things that should not be optional, and many airlines want the cheapest airplane you can get,” said Mark H. Goodrich, an aviation lawyer and former engineering test pilot. “And Boeing is able to say, ‘Hey, it was available.’”

But what Boeing doesn’t say, he added, is that it has become “a great profit center” for the manufacturer.

The three American airlines that bought the 737 Max each took a different approach to outfitting the cockpits.

American Airlines, which ordered 100 of the planes and has 24 in its fleet, bought both the angle of attack indicator and the disagree light, the company said.

Southwest Airlines, which ordered 280 of the planes and counts 36 in its fleet so far, had already purchased the disagree alert option, and it also installed an angle of attack indicator in a display mounted above the pilots’ heads. After the Lion Air crash, Southwest said it would modify its 737 Max fleet to place the angle of attack indicator on the pilots’ main computer screens.

United Airlines, which ordered 137 of the planes and has received 14, did not select the indicators or the disagree light. A United spokesman said the airline does not include the features because its pilots use other data to fly the plane.

When it was rolled out, MCAS took readings from only one sensor on any given flight, leaving the system vulnerable to a single point of failure. One theory in the Lion Air crash is that MCAS was receiving faulty data from one of the sensors, prompting an unrecoverable nose dive.

In the software update that Boeing says is coming soon, MCAS will be modified to take readings from both sensors. If there is a meaningful disagreement between the readings, MCAS will be disabled.

In that case, the causality is easy to determine. But that’s not the case with more complex systems, so it’s easier to rationalize a bias (I don’t need this expensive QA)

There are real problems at Boeing and those are real issues, but let's beware of the BS that comes with the kind of widespread pile-on that's happening now.

This article reads like an Internet rant to me, with the sarcasm, hyperbole, and ridicule. Those things aren't awful in themselves (though they've become very overused and tiresome to me), but they crowd out actual facts, details, nuance, complexities. If you write 'it's the worst thing ever', you omit where and how it's bad, where it's not, the consequences, the trade-offs, etc. I don't learn what happened, how, or why, just that you are really, really, really pissed off.

Examples:

* pieces are flying off the Boeing planes actually in use at an alarming rate

* to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.

* obligatory vanity “leadership” book - note the ridicule and scare quotes.

* suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments* -- now using fonts for emphasis

* in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing

* Qatar Airways had become so disgusted ..., coincidentally matching the author's emotion

* one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of American justice

It's like series of Reddit comments, and the world certainly doesn't need more of that. The author's and American Prospect's quality is no better than Boeing's.

There was a recent discussion right here on HN about "trading trust": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39394990

Basically, many of these companies took decades to reach these positions where they're trusted. A bunch of managers rightfully figured out this was an asset that could be easily traded away for increased profits and they'd be gone by the time anyone noticed the devastation they left behind.

Does quality matter as much for X as it does for Boeing? A closer example to Boeing is Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla is a mixed bag of good and bad stuff. But SpaceX is a marvel and essentially has no competitors.

Compare X to media. Since the bridge collapse in the Baltimore I have read interesting analysis on X and reddit, not the best medium, but yet did not come across a single decent article about it in the media.