In the case of Boeing, it might be challenging to know how much you can cut costs before you materially impact the business. What exactly is essential? I'm cert

In the case of Boeing, it might be challenging to know how much you can cut costs before you materially impact the business. What exactly is essential? I'm certainly no expert in the aeronautical, but who really knows if trimming two sensors down to one has a good ROI? As an engineer, I typically know that redundancy is a good thing. But maybe their historical data showed that those sensors have very, very low chance of failing. Maybe they've never previously even encountered the situation where the second was remotely necessary. They could've backtested the impact of removing the sensor, and found no concerns. We could assume a more ominous intent here, but with Boeing's reputation on the line, I doubt they would've actually been interested in cutting costs at the expense of lives -- we can see the impact that had today on their reputation. Many little cost-cutting decisions are made, and many are probably likely to be inconsequential. It's easy for us to say, "obviously cutting 2 sensors to 1" was the wrong choice. But you could make the same argument for any other cost-cutting measure they employed, that had no safety impact. The difference here, is unfortunately this one brought a huge public eye on Boeing. It's good to cut costs (where reasonably possible), and it's good to return value to shareholders. Those are things expected of public companies. They probably compared themselves to their peers, realized that stock buybacks is the current metric to which public companies are being measured by, and over-optimized for it. A lot of people look at their peers to decide what to do themselves, even multi-national companies. This time, it didn't pan out.