[ilikehurdles]

Unions give employees the knowledge and leverage to push back against unrealistic demands, deadlines, and cost-cutting measures without retaliation. These kinds of rushed solutions causing more problems down the line are caused by a culture that rewards employees who put up with managers breathing down their neck.

[CamperBob2]

Irrelevant in this case, though. While concerns have indeed been raised about SC production quality, this particular story involves an engineering failure, not a production issue. Boeing engineers are unionized through SPEEA. They can bring the company to its knees at contract negotiation time, and they have done so in the past.

[robocat]

I disagree, it is also a production issue because:

"One whistleblower reported to the FAA that they had seen damage to the electrical wiring connected to the plane’s angle of attack sensor from a foreign object, which feeds data to the MCAS system so it can determine whether it needs to engage to prevent the plane from stalling. This wouldn’t be the first time Boeing’s manufacturing process reportedly had problems guarding plane components against foreign object debris produced by the fabrication process."

[CamperBob2]

Stuff happens. The fact that damage to a single AOA sensor -- whether in the factory or in the field -- could cause this sort of event is strictly an engineering issue.

[robocat]

It is most definitely not "strictly" an engineering issue.

By that logic you can say it is a quality control, FAA or management issue (and not an engineering issue) - because the engineering problem was not caught by other systems.

Also "engineering" created the AoA disagree alert. Whoever decided to make that an optional feature should be "strictly" at fault? Maybe it is the fault of the airlines that decided not to have that feature installed?

Engineering is just one part of a complex system so why do you think engineering should be blamed 100% for failures that occurred due to the whole system?

[CamperBob2]

Engineering is just one part of a complex system so why do you think engineering should be blamed 100% for failures that occurred due to the whole system?

Because that's the only way something this complicated can possibly work. Fault tolerance is optional only if failure is considered to be a valid option.

Getting back to what happened in this case: at some point, a Boeing engineer was asked to make MCAS work with input from only one AoA sensor. That person could have made all the difference by saying, "Lol no," and SPEEA would have had their back.

[robocat]

You should be rebutting my points. To rebut your new points:

I think failure is always acceptable engineering: a defining feature of engineering is finding compromises because we don't have infinite resources, infinite ability, or perfect materials.

> a Boeing engineer was asked to make MCAS work

That sounds like you are just making stuff up about a team of engineers. So your opinion is this is all the fault of a single engineer? Not engineering after all?