[MerManMaid]

It was bad engineering full stop.

Yes the root cause might stem from management but good engineering would not have the doors flying off... thus bad engineering. Regardless of everything else, engineers are responsible for their designs at the end of the day. (Yes when management only approves cheap unsafe designs)

Otherwise you are "just following orders" which is not a viable leg to stand on.

[db48x]

I disagree. First, remember that we’re not talking about doors here, but walls. Specifically, a door plug which is a type of wall segment that can be put into the space where room was left in the airframe for an optional door. If you cannot get that detail correct, maybe your opinion doesn’t count for much.

Second, the steps for assembly of an airplane are all very important. If any of them are skipped or left out somehow, the plane will break! You can’t engineer your way out of this problem either: the more ways you add of attaching that door plug to the airframe, the more possibilities there are for mistakes. That’s why the assembly process requires one team to install the plug and another team to verify that installation was completed correctly and according to the specifications.

Any time you have managers using semantics to weasel their way out of the inspections that verify that the plane was assembled correctly, that’s the mistake. Full stop. Fire those idiots.

[sdwr]

You absolutely can engineer your way out of those problems. There is always a simpler, easier way to put things together.

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1819772716339339664

I think what happened is, Boeing codified all these labor-intensive manual processes back when they were riding high. The planes were selling well, they were state of the art. Now, 30 years later, it takes the same amount of effort to put everything together without mistakes, but the relative value of the finished product is less.