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Boeing is America's last aviation company and its single largest exporter.
After the company was allowed to merge with its rival McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, the combined company came under MDD's notoriously financially oriented management culture.
MDD CEO Harry #|Stonecipher became Boeing's CEO in the early 2000s.
Stonecipher was a protege of Jack #Welch, the man who destroyed General Electric with cuts to quality and workforce and aggressive union-busting, a classic Mafia-style "bust-out" that devoured the company's seed corn and left it a barren wasteland:
https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis
Boeing was led by its first chairman without a traditional aviation background:
James McNerney had instead spent almost two decades in management at General Electric
—now, he was following a tried-and-tested route of cutting, downsizing, and shifting.
That approach was applied to upgrading the 737, which had become the victim of its own success.
In its five-decade history, airlines have cumulatively ordered more than 10,000 of the planes
—an aviation rock star.
But rather than retiring the plane, and replacing it with the next big thing,
Boeing instead opted to keep costs down by tinkering and adjusting the model to fit still more passengers.
The version it called the Max, writes Irving in the Daily Beast, was the alternative, cheaper solution.
“The airlines went for it because the new engines promised higher efficiency and
—so it seemed
—pilots would find it very simple to move from the [1997 737 Next Gen] to the Max.”
Pilots have long been aware of the plane’s shortcomings.
Writing in the engineering industry publication IEEE Spectrum,
pilot and software developer Gregory Travis explains how these repeat redesigns have led to recent tragedies.
The plane was designed for a time before machine-aided cargo loading
and so sits low to the ground to aid ground crews hauling baggage.
But as the planes grew larger, so too have their engines.
Instead of being hung under the wing, as in earlier models, the engines have been moved forward and upward,
potentially leading to an aerodynamic stall under certain circumstances.
“Instead of going back to the drawing board and getting the airframe hardware right,
Boeing relied on something called the
‘Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,’ or MCAS,” he writes.
Put very crudely, this was a software fix for a hardware problem
—and one that was far from perfect.
In Travis’ estimation, the software relied on the wrong systems and sensors,
without cross-checking them against other easily accessible information from the plane’s sensors.
“None of the above should have passed muster,” he writes.
“None of the above should have passed the ‘OK’ pencil of the most junior engineering staff.”