Honestly.. if you read my posts here about this I was ardently supporting Boeing through all of this and putting a majority of the blame on pilots/training culture.. and while I still hold that those planes did not NEED to crash, I feel like Boeing is losing its way post 777 success
They were historically very good at building planes, they launched the 757/767 together and the 777 was very successfully rolled out, and was a real game changer when it did so.. biggest engines, longest ETOPS time, etc., a TON of firsts.. yet the development was crazy fast... launched in 1990 and flying by 1995.. the 747 was crazy fast development as well, with many firsts that really, were topped (the A380 is bigger and more efficient, but it's a commercial failure)
so what happened? How did Boeing go from quickly building groundbreaking, good, successful airplanes.. to rolling out what now appears to be very late, and from what we've heard by QA whislteblowers on the 787, 737, and Air Force tanker 767, sloppy construction? How did they lose their way? I recently read that the 777X fuselage spectacularly failed well below the design limit.. I get that's why we test, but it seems like some core component of the company has changed and the Boeing of the 2000s is not the Boeing of the 1990s and prior
I know you were. Just now they also has a “software problem” with their aerospace unit as well with a “rocket” that didn’t activate a timer at a critical point (I haven’t read through the whole thread to see if this is mentioned now, it was reported as I saw it today)...
I have a suspicion that a lot of their problems are from software, and also in trying to fudge. They had such a great rep before, but managers always start looking to cutting corners, and sales gets in the picture and that often ends up in very bad decisions.
I think there is enough blame to go around, but still their practices to me seem to have become profit oriented at the expense of common sense safety. With he introduction of software, and the current state of software management, testing, and the methodology of the day, software is a weak point in my experience. I’ve seen it myself in a less critical but very complex system. I don’t know if they did this, but the trend is as Kurt Vonnegut explained so well many years ago “nobody wants to pay for maintenance”.
I sincerely hope they haven’t fallen victim to the same practices I see in the software community in general, but it involves managers that are not technically proficient (not technically a problem, unless they get the idea that they know better than the systems developers) and who constantly cut costs, in testing especially, but also in coding review, system planning, etc. what I see in my world and work is cost cutting that is totally negligent as to reality. In complex systems there are often routines, that since they are called by other systems, any change must be tested thoroughly. It’s costly. Testing itself is an art.
Just my opinion that where software programming used to be both an art and a higher call. I’ve seen it go from respect for he difficulty and need for teamwork, to managers thinking software engineers are like LEGO pieces, interchangeable, and don’t have an understanding of the technical.
it’s bottom line BS and I see it all the time now. We had a huge, important system that is critical (not like an airliner critical, but still, banking system that was pretty important) where they farmed out porting it from Unix to Linux and the foreign team that ported it made huge mistakes and introduced bugs, and rewrote code without much understanding of the actual purpose and issues. We have to live with the bugs, and try to fix them but the overall code was changed enough that they locked us in. Meanwhile amazingly the company paid them off as if they had done the job when there was a ton of work left (this because of managers wanting to appear to be competent when they weren’t) and the onus was put on the site engineers to actually do the porting and fix the bad code. They really had no understanding of the application, and didn’t care, and what amazed me more was the customer who could have made a fuss ALSO had managers whose reputation was tied up in this, who wanted it to just be “over and done with” even though it was buggy and crap.
Part of the problem is the McDonald-Douglas/Boeing merger in the 1990s....or as it was referred to internally, "McD bought Boeing with Boeing's money". There was a great deal of animosity between the two cultures. Then, as I mentioned in an earlier post, creating the MAX was approved by a previous CEO who was not an engineer and had zero experience in aviation/aerospace. But the board brought him on anyway. While I was there (late 90s,early 2000s) it was not just obvious but blatant that the lawyers were/are running the company and making technical decisions, not the engineers. And the engineers were not happy, not happy at all.
This. Same as I write above. There seems to me to be a trend where everybody is an “expert”, managers who think in “units” and don’t have a love of or capacity to understand what they are trying to manage. For them it may as well be dishwashers, or soap, it’s all the same thing and they have no understanding for the actual technical decisions and thought process, they really don’t have a clue, and they don’t listen to the actual experts. This is the crux of it all to me. Short sighted, bottom liners that want to command and bend reality to their whims. It’s totally disgusting to me.
I'm sure there's gonna be more. Has EASA and JATRs spoken up yet? 
