I agree in principle, but I don't think industries should be looking at current-day Boeing's engineering practices except for an example of how a proud company's culture can rot from the inside out with fatal consequences.
I think Boeing has had some difficulties. They have also had some undeniable successes. The 777 and 787 programs have no in-service passenger fatalities attributable to engineering errors to date. That's a monumental achievement.
At this point the secret sauce is that the EAA isn’t tolerating the same degree of certification fucking and laxity from airbus, and that they generally seem to have their act together.
Like what’s the secret sauce of nvidia vs radeon or AMD vs intel? Reliable execution, seemingly - and this is an environment where failures are supposed to be contained to very specific rates at given levels of severity.
The FAA has gotten into a mode where they let boeing sign off on their own deviations from the rules, the engine changes forced the introduction of the nose-pusher-down system which really should have required training, but Boeing didn't want to do that, because the whole point of doing the weird engine thing was having ostensible "airframe compatibility" despite the changes in flight characteristics. And they have become so large (like intel) that they don’t have to care anymore, because they know there’s no chance of actual regulatory consequences, nor can the EAA kick them out without causing a diplomatic incident and massively disrupting air travel, so they are no longer rigorous, and we simply have to deal with Boeing’s “meltdown”.
And yes they should be doing better but in the abstract, certification processes always need to be dealing with “uncooperative” participants who may want to conceal derogatory information or pencil-whip certification. You need to build processes that don’t let that happen and nowadays there’s so much of a revolving door that they can just get away with it. Like none of this would have happened with the classified personnel certification process etc - it is fundamentally a problem of a corrupted and ineffective certification process.
This decline in certification led to an inevitable decline in quality. When companies figure out it’s a paper tiger then there’s no reason to spend the money to do good engineering.
The FAA’s processes are both too strict and too lax - we have moved into the regulatory capture phase where they purely serve the interests of the industry giants who are already established and consolidated, and they now serve primarily to exclude any competitors rather than ensure consistent quality of engineering.
The specifics are less interesting than that high-level problem - there obviously eventually would be some form of engineering malfeasance that resulted from regulatory capture, the specific form is less important than the forces that produced it. And that regulatory capture problem exists across basically the whole American system. Why do we have forced arbitration on everything, why are our trains dumping poison into our towns? Because from 1980-2020 we basically handed control of legislative policy over to corporate interests and then allowed a massive degree of consolidation. Not that airbus is small, but the EAA isn’t regulatory capture to the extent of most American bureaus.
It's actually safer for new airplane types to have flying characteristics like the previous types. There have been many accidents where a situation happened and the pilot did the right thing for the previous airplane he flew, but was the wrong thing for the one he was currently flying.
Most of what was written about the MAX crashes in the mass media is utter garbage and misinformation. No surprise there, as journalists have zero expertise in how airplanes work.
Both crashes could have been easily averted if the crews had followed well-known procedures. There was also nothing wrong with the aerodynamics of the MAX, nor the concept of the MCAS system. The flaw was in the way the MCAS system was implemented, and the way the pilots responded to it.
For example, rarely mentioned is the third MAX incident, where the airplane continued normally to their destination. The crew simply turned off the stab trim system.
BTW, I had a nice conversation with a 737 pilot a few months ago. He told me what I had already concluded - the crashed crews did not follow the procedures. I've also had unsolicited emails from pilots who told me what I'd written about it was true.
Everything I wrote is true. The LA crew restored normal trim 25 times, but never thought to turn off the stab trim system. The trim cutoff switch is right there on the center console within easy reach for just that purpose.
The EA crew oversped the airplane (you can hear the overspeed warning horn on the CVR) and did nothing to correct it. This made things worse. They were also given an Emergency Airworthiness Directive which said to restore normal trim switches, then turn off the trim system. They did not.
That's it.
I'd say half the fault was Boeing's, the other half the flight crews'.
The MCAS is not a bad concept, note that MCAS is still there in the MAX.
Pilots are a brotherhood, and they don't care to criticize other pilots in public. But they will in private.
Everything you said might well be true, and indeed as far as I know it is, but aircraft should not have fail-deadly systems which require lightning reflexes and up-to-the-second training to diagnose and disable fast enough before they crash the freaking plane in the first place. Yes, the pilots of the affected flights might have been able to save the aircraft if their training had been just that little bit better. We'll never know. But the real blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Boeing for shipping such a ticking time bomb in the first place.
Which is why the entire worldwide MAX fleet was grounded for more than a year, and the regulators didn't just mandate a bit of extra training.
Coming up with this narrative about how it's the crew's fault because they failed to disable Boeing's quietly introduced little self-destruct system fast enough to save their own lives was a particularly despicable move from their PR department and I lost a lot of respect for them over that.
>Both crashes could have been easily averted if the crews had followed well-known procedures.
I thought that the majority of the problems was that Boeing wanted the same type-rating, so that airlines could avoid paying for training. This resulted in crews not getting proper training and so not knowing the proper procedures ... which was by decision.
Both the airlines and Boeing should take the blame; I don't really see how it would be the pilots fault, if you lie and say "it's the same plane, it flies the same, you don't need conversion training".
I am not in aviation, most of this is from YouTube sources, so y'know ...