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Ultimately, the core issue here is corporate greed. Redesigning an entire plane is expensive and time consuming. Slapping hacks and patches onto an existing air

Ultimately, the core issue here is corporate greed. Redesigning an entire plane is expensive and time consuming. Slapping hacks and patches onto an existing airframe with modifications is cheaper. To use a software analogy, Boeing hasn't paid down its technical debt. Except instead of broken services or customer outages, it's peoples' lives. It's the same reason that many companies don't pay down their tech debt, it only indirectly helps the bottom line and it's hard to get business leaders to understand why engineering needs to redesign something.

lutorm 8y ago
It's not really about corporate greed, it's about people wanting to fly as cheap as possible. Redesigning an entire plane is indeed expensive and time consuming, and that cost would be passed on to the passengers. The airline industry is very cost-sensitive. Gradually refining an airframe is done all the time and is not a cause for concern. If corners were really cut in analyzing the implications of such modifications, that's where the problem lies. But the vast majority of airframes in use today, civilian and to an even greater extent military, and they were often designed in the 70s. (And some very successful planes, like the C-130 and B-52, were designed in the 50s.)
- aphextron 8y ago
  >It's not really about corporate greed, it's about people wanting to fly as cheap as possible. Redesigning an entire plane is indeed expensive and time consuming, and that cost would be passed on to the passengers. The airline industry is very cost-sensitive. Completely regardless of a redesign, the MAX is a perfectly safe aircraft (WITH the proper additional MCAS training). The reason these people died is because Boeing didn't want to have to get a new type rating for their modified airframe, thus making it an easier sell to airlines. Corporate greed killed those people.
- jorblumesea 8y ago
  Please, all indications are that Boeing skipped on regulation, testing and design all the way through. It also included valuable sensors as a "value add in" instead of in the base model. It also disincentivized pilot training and a host of other security measures because they knew client would balk at the costs being passed down, due to Boeing's own design decisions, most notably the "hack" of using the 737 type, despite large modifications to the entire aircraft. Essentially, Boeing made a bunch of cost cutting decisions and cut every corner they could. Patches were developed and changes were suggested, but were delayed or cancelled due to business and political reasons.
chungleong 8y ago
Your post reminds me of that Onion article where a plane crash was blamed on "the best-laid plans of mice and men". Shifting people's attention to some general, existential crisis is what you do when you want to dodge uncomfortable questions.

lutorm 8y ago

It's not really about corporate greed, it's about people wanting to fly as cheap as possible. Redesigning an entire plane is indeed expensive and time consuming, and that cost would be passed on to the passengers. The airline industry is very cost-sensitive. Gradually refining an airframe is done all the time and is not a cause for concern. If corners were really cut in analyzing the implications of such modifications, that's where the problem lies. But the vast majority of airframes in use today, civilian and to an even greater extent military, and they were often designed in the 70s. (And some very successful planes, like the C-130 and B-52, were designed in the 50s.)

aphextron 8y ago
>It's not really about corporate greed, it's about people wanting to fly as cheap as possible. Redesigning an entire plane is indeed expensive and time consuming, and that cost would be passed on to the passengers. The airline industry is very cost-sensitive. Completely regardless of a redesign, the MAX is a perfectly safe aircraft (WITH the proper additional MCAS training). The reason these people died is because Boeing didn't want to have to get a new type rating for their modified airframe, thus making it an easier sell to airlines. Corporate greed killed those people.
jorblumesea 8y ago
Please, all indications are that Boeing skipped on regulation, testing and design all the way through. It also included valuable sensors as a "value add in" instead of in the base model. It also disincentivized pilot training and a host of other security measures because they knew client would balk at the costs being passed down, due to Boeing's own design decisions, most notably the "hack" of using the 737 type, despite large modifications to the entire aircraft. Essentially, Boeing made a bunch of cost cutting decisions and cut every corner they could. Patches were developed and changes were suggested, but were delayed or cancelled due to business and political reasons.

chungleong 8y ago

Your post reminds me of that Onion article where a plane crash was blamed on "the best-laid plans of mice and men". Shifting people's attention to some general, existential crisis is what you do when you want to dodge uncomfortable questions.