With their last new aircraft, this happened many times. For example, they discovered that the pieces didn't fit together: https://www.seattletimes.com/business

With their last new aircraft, this happened many times. For example, they discovered that the pieces didn't fit together: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-finds-787-pieces-arent-quite-a-perfect-fit/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-finds-787-piece... I agree that someone with a title like Systems Engineer should be responsible for such issues, but (having worked at Boeing) not every group has systems engineers overseeing their work. Or they're working in a different city and you get a phone conference with them once a month. This should be no surprise. Conway's Law in action. You can look at the issues that Boeing has and guess to a reasonable degree of accuracy what their organizational structures look like. > You always expect out-of-spec conditions to be a possibility and have something in place to handle those conditions appropriately. To not do so is incompetence bordering on negligence. I don't think it's possible to build an airplane if you have to expect this from every system. Any flying machine has many single points of failure. An F-15 once famously flew and landed after losing a wing. This is clearly out-of-spec but no aircraft considers this condition a realistic possibility or has contingency procedures for it. Exercise for the reader (and maybe a good interview question for a manager): draw the organizational structure for a team to design and manufacture a new airliner. List the single points of failure on the aircraft, and point to who is responsible for them. Would you fly on this? What did you miss?