by JazCE on 3/13/24, 9:27 AM with 83 comments
by rramadass on 3/14/24, 5:16 AM
If you parcel out parts of your job in something as critical as Airplane Construction, it is your responsibility to validate all specifications/testing/verification/etc. If you treat "Airplane Engineering" as mere "Embedded Engineering" you need to be put out of business.
The article explicitly says MCAS and "cockpit warning light not working" problems (which were the cause of the two crashes) were NOT outsourced.
Key points;
“Boeing was doing all kinds of things, everything you can imagine, to reduce cost, including moving work from Puget Sound, because we’d become very expensive here,” said Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer laid off in 2017. “All that’s very understandable if you think of it from a business perspective. Slowly over time it appears that’s eroded the ability for Puget Sound designers to design.
Rabin, the former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature. “I was shocked that in a room full of a couple hundred mostly senior engineers we were being told that we weren’t needed,” said Rabin, who was laid off in 2015.
“Engineering started becoming a commodity,” said Vance Hilderman, who co-founded a company called TekSci that supplied aerospace contract engineers and began losing work to overseas competitors in the early 2000s.
The last point is the most damning; Airplane Engineering cannot be commodity engineering.
by aslihana on 3/13/24, 5:59 PM
Shame. Industrial companies, if you decide as pincher, you will be doomed in your little world... as it always has been :)
by jkic47 on 3/13/24, 9:44 AM
As I understand it, the software performed exactly as designed, forcing the nose of the plane downwards to counter the upwards torque produced by the engines being offset relative to the centre of gravity of the plane.
Mentour Pilot had a great episode on the two tragic accidents. It appears that Boeing did not expose the way the software was designed to behave, and the system silently turned itself back on even after the pilots disengaged it.
by zamfi on 3/13/24, 2:04 PM
by lencastre on 3/13/24, 6:41 PM
by tremorscript on 3/14/24, 4:05 AM
by reboot_boom on 3/15/24, 5:43 PM
by ilrwbwrkhv on 3/14/24, 1:26 AM
by nottorp on 3/13/24, 7:15 PM
Seriously? I mean, could you still order anything but a Max from Boeing in that size? And that being the most useful size, of course it became the top seller. Because it was the only offering.
by darkhorn on 3/13/24, 2:41 PM
by Madmallard on 3/13/24, 5:46 PM