[class3shock]

This is not how companies work. Engineers at Boeing didn't have a design labeled "not-good-enough-but-cheap" and another labelled "more-skookum-but-is-expensive" and because they were bad engineers decided to go with the cheap one. It's a systemic issue due to cost cutting by, you guessed it, people MBA's.

No engineer, if given the choice, would have re-used the old plane design instead of designing a fully new, modern plane, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.

No engineer, if given the choice, would have put the plane through as little testing as they did or sold it as not requiring much training for pilots, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.

No engineer, if given the choice, would have separated the manufacturing facility out of Boeing, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.

These are decisions that were pushed by higher ups (with MBAs) that engineers have to live with. They aren't "wrong" decisions, there is nothing in them an engineer could look at and say "this will, 100% cause a failure down the road and I demand we not do this". What they are is steps in the wrong direction, steps away from the "best" decision that could have made from a safety and quality standpoint. Take enough and eventually they add up into what happened.

I think the best way I can put it is if, as an engineering org that deals with real world things, you aren't pushing towards best practices, higher standards, and technical excellence than you are either stagnating or declining. In either case your quality will decline without anyone doing anything "wrong" as you end up with people with increasingly less experience and resources being asked to do more work. And the worst part is you can get away with that and often companies do. But if you go to far eventually you cross a threshold where cumulative effects push you over the boundary of failure.

[cryptonector]

And no engineer would have gone with only two AoA sensors.

And no engineer would have made the computer ignore one of those two AoA sensors because two isn't enough and now you have a dilemma of which to trust.

And no engineer would have cooked up the cockamamie idea of hiding the new CAS scheme so that they could claim that the new plane was the same type as the previous plane.

And no engineer would have insisted that the new plane was the same type as the previous plane.

And no engineer would have threatened the U.S. Congress with canceling the whole program if they don't get the waivers needed to get the plane flying.

And...

[jm4]

Yet, the engineers did go with two AoA sensors. The MBA’s aren’t putting the planes together. Ultimately, it’s engineers who build the planes within the budget and parameters set by the bean counters. Somebody decided 2 AoA sensors were good enough and the engineers built it that way, presumably giving the ok to use just 2 sensors or they would have cut some other corner instead.

There’s plenty of blame to go around and many people deserve to be fired, but this notion that the engineers should get a free pass because an MBA told them to do it is absurd. Obviously, it was engineers giving assurances they could, in fact, build a safe airplane per requirements. It’s silly to think management would go through with building a plane if the engineers had told them in no uncertain terms that it had fundamental flaws. It’s a big fat fail all around.

[class3shock]

But it wasn't an engineer, nor any one person, that made all the decisions that lead to this failure. It was company culture, driven from the top down, to cut costs. Who is accountable for that?

Who is at fault if a cars brakes fail? The mechanic that installed them wrong? Or the boss that overworked them, expected them to get more brakes installed for less money every year, didn't give them the proper training to learn how to install the brakes, and hired that mechanic after firing the senior one with more experience because the new mechanic was cheaper?

[M95D]

If the engineer doesn't remove the 3rd sensor to match cost expectations of the bean counter, then the bean counter can always find another engineer, fresh out of school, afraid for his job and CV, with no real-world experience, that WILL remove that 3rd sensor if someone yells at him/her or is offered a promotion for his/her "achievements". This new engineer will also cost less to hire than the old experienced engineer.

[cryptonector]

Yes. But a company with good engineering culture will also have review schemes that the bean counter can't get around without having to remove all the "troublesome" senior engineers who do the reviews.

[M95D]

Yes, it takes a few years or decades to replace all of them and change the engineering culture. How long has it been since MD aquisition??

[cryptonector]

Corporate culture can rot quite fast.