In October 2018, a Boeing 737 Max passenger jet crashed shortly after takeoff off the coast of Indonesia. Five months later, following an eerily similar flight pattern, another 737 Max 8 went down in Ethiopia. Everyone on board the flights died.

"Boeing's Fatal Flaw," a FRONTLINE documentary in collaboration with The New York Times, tells the inside story of what led up to the crashes — revealing how intense market pressure and failed oversight contributed to tragic deaths and a catastrophic crisis for one of the world’s most iconic industrial names.

"failed oversight"

Not all problems are solved by adding more "oversight."

You can't make up for lack of talent in your organization by adding more "oversight."

You can't make up for outsourcing code to idiots for $9/hr with "oversight" either, when the "oversight" allows it.

Not to mention the other idiots that designed and approved how the controls were setup, how they interacted with the software, and designed the pilot training and procedures.

Boeing could have saved a lot of time, money, and terror by just lining all those passengers up and shooting them.

Planes didn't get harder to build or fly.

The world is getting dumber.

And the stock price crashed like their planes did.

This article seemed reasonable about the culture shift after the merger.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/

1) you cannot QA your way into success.
2) the user will always fuck things up.

Kharn

I think the problem occured several times before the fatal crashes but the US pilots were able to overcome the problem due to training. Not to say there wasn't a problem that needed fixing but the US pilots received different training.

Why is it necessary to design new planes? There are existing designs to cover all different endurance and passenger requirements. Why dont they just keep existing designs?

intense market pressure and failed oversight

aka diversity hiring practices

dress it up however you want

The management who chose to outsource the code to the lowest bidder in a 3rd world country is the "oversight" being referred to.  Perfect case of Dr Deming being right.  They should have stuck with TQM instead of Lean.

I’m intrigued
Go on

The 737's crashed because pilots thought they could push a button and the computer would fly the plane for them. And when it didn't, they didn't know what to do - and they should have. It's why I fly US based carriers wherever I can - Europe second. You couldn't pay me to get on an African airline.

I'm not in the industry but this applies to many different ones.   Manufacturers looking for new revenue.  Consumers (big corporations) never ending push to decrease operating and maintenance costs.  A slight change in fuel efficiency,  can result in major savings long term for a big fleet.  

IIRC, they moved the engines (affecting weight/balance) because of the added length and then tried to use programming to compensate. I could be wrong.

MCAS had flaws…Pilots killed everyone.

Additional diameter moved the engines ahead of the wings.

Kharn

Heard that it’s environment sucks from multiple people I know who interned there and one who works there, he got laid off and moved somewhere else once already.

Never applied myself because of said stories

Don’t forget the basic economics of the fact that if one company fails to innovate their competitor will and will eliminate them or seriously hurt them.

They crammed two massive engines that were too forward of the wing, creating a stall condition at high attack angles, and extended a fuselage that didn’t need to be extended.

ALL of that because Boeing didn’t want to redesign the 757.

I mean, why ever try and improve anything?

This might be an example of how not to improve, but stagnation should never be the answer.

Attached File

It's highly dependent on where you're located IMO or even which program you support.  Culture and environment changes quite a bit from one site/program to the next.  There are quite a few local aero companies and I could easily find a handful of people to tell you horror stories about any one of them.

Was it MCAS or the AoA sensor that screwes the pooch?

Hmm they've been popping up very often on my LinkedIn jobs feed recently. I had that suspicion. Hard pass!

(September 17 2021)  Federal prosecutors 'will criminally charge a former Boeing test pilot' they suspect of misleading FAA regulators about 737 MAX safety issues that contributed to two deadly crashes and grounded the planes for two years


Federal prosecutors are preparing to criminally charge a former Boeing pilot who is suspected of misleading regulators about safety issues during the approval process for the troubled 737 MAX, according to a new report.

Mark Forkner, Boeing's 737 MAX chief technical pilot during the aircraft's development, could face charges in the next few weeks, people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.

Prosecutors have been probing whether Forkner intentionally lied to the Federal Aviation Administration about the nature of new flight control software on the jet, which suffered two deadly crashes within months, killing 346 people.

Forkner's attorney David Gerger did not immediately respond to an inquiry from DailyMail.com early on Friday.

Gerger has previously said that his client would never intentionally hide a safety issue.




Former Boeing pilot Mark Forkner could face criminal charges in a matter of weeks



'Mark flew the MAX. His Air Force buddies flew the MAX. He would never put himself, his friends or any passenger in an unsafe plane,' Gerger told the Journal in 2019.

It wasn't immediately clear what criminal charges might be brought against Forkner, but Boeing previously admitted in a settlement that two unnamed employees conspired to defraud the FAA about MAX training issues to benefit themselves and the company.

Forkner had said he might have unintentionally misled regulators, in a series of internal messages from 2016 that became public in October.

The messages appeared to have been the first publicly known observations that the crucial MCAS anti-stall system behaved erratically during testing before the aircraft entered service.

Malfunctions with the MCAS system, complicated by inadequate training, were implicated in the fatal crashes of Lion Air 610 in 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines 302 just months later.



The comments by Forkner in internal messages were among those pinpointed by U.S. lawmakers in hearings in Washington as evidence that Boeing knew about problems with flight control software.

Forkner persuaded regulators to approve excluding details of the new MCAS flight-control system from the 737 MAX's pilot manuals, according to a U.S. House investigation.

Boeing benefited from the exclusion, because it reduced the mandatory new training for pilots who had flown older models of the 737, making the upgraded jet more attractive to potential airline customers.

The MCAS, which kicks in automatically in some flight conditions, is intended to push the nose of the plane down to compensate for a tendency of MAX planes to pitch up due to larger engines.

Investigators believe that when it malfunctioned on the fatal flights, the pilots did not realize that the MCAS was pushing the noses of the planes down, and thus didn't take steps to disable it.


Continued

I would say the MCAS was the main problem.  Sensors fail, a control system should not doggedly react to a single failed sensor.

The 737 Max never should have been.

The original 737's were designed before there were 'Jetways". They were built low to the ground with an integral boarding ladder.  Baggage handlers could load bags easy at ground level. The original engines were the old, skinny, cigar shaped turbojets. Boeing bastardized it with the ginormous new engines that had to be mounted more forward in order clear the ground.

Early 737 -

Killed the 757 because the industry didn't seem to know what to do with it and then tried to make a 737 a 757 because the industry wanted something like it.  

How about blaming idiotic EPA policies that make modern commercial airplanes inherently unstable in flight?

They are forced to be designed for "low emission and gas mileage" instead of safety and stability in flight.

Modern airliners fly on the edge of falling out of the sky. Literally.

They are inherently unsafe.

No passenger airplane should require 87 sensors to maintain a stable flight profile.

Watching now.
I really hate seeing what's been happening to Boeing.

Lol

737-100 the first 737 ever produced at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, WA.

You've posted this complete non-sense before, and refused to justify it before.

I'm one of the few A320 pilots who've purposely flown the aircraft in Alternate Law. It flies great.

Modern aircraft are immensely safe, and when flown and maintained by well trained pilots and maintenance personnel, even safer. No where near "inherently unsafe."

I can really only think of one modern (built since 1975) transport category aircraft I'd say was "challenging to fly" from a data standpoint, and that was the MD-11.

What specific EPA policies are those?

Emissions are an engine driven metric, and fuel efficiency is mostly a business driven one.

Modern aircraft are far more safe and stable than first generation ones. That's a demonstrated fact.

The 737 design was a stagnation, primarily due to the desire to sell to Southwest and Ryan. Boeing took a 1960s RJ and trick screwed into a intercontinental jet. But, at its heart was the same shortened 1950s 707 tube, with a 1960 flight deck with the same gear.

Worked the MAX program for 3 years. The culture was pretty normal BCA, which is very different than defense programs, but it wasn't what I'd call bad. There were cost concerns across all the airplane development programs, which is normal. There was a need to increase seats and use less fuel, thereby extending range. Really sad to see how it turned out, no question about that.

I thought it was the tequila.

@disco_jon75

I'd never heard of Dr. Deming before, so I was intrigued by your comment and found his 14 Points:

https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/

Some of them make sense, like building in quality, but some of them seem counter-intuitive, like "eliminate objectives."

Which of Deming's points do you think applies here, and why?

Only time airliners are unsafe is when they're sitting at the gate.

"That's something you don't see everyday!!"
Is a frequent saying on the ramp.....

https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/

Can't speak to the Max program 'cause I haven't supported BCAC since the late 80's.  But Boeing in general:

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

6. Institute training on the job.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

11a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.

11b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

12a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.

12b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.

I won't even get into the fiasco of Boeing trying to rivet composites to metal....and the resulting cracks over time.

Old -100s with the JT-8, which were low bypass turbofans also found on DC-9s and 727s.

Continental had some of those junks, ex Lufthansa/Peoples Express. One came into CVG with the forward baggage door open, fortunately their pax loads were so light(5-10pax) no bags were dumped over Cincinnati.

Watt?

A lack of excellence and professionalism in one area is a tell for a lack of professionalism and excellence in other areas.

That it's allowed to go on for so long is also a tell for the quality of the management team.

There's quite a few articles out there about how Boeing changed from being a company managed by former engineers to being something completely different after their merger, and which was further exacerbated by upper management moving to Chicago.

Articles describe the engineers complaining that management used to understand them and listen to them, but no longer did - because the new management didn't have the depth of engineering background that the old management did.

3 years from actually retiring, no further comments (love the 757 and 767)