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Boeing's Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster

282 points by johnny313 7y ago

ssivark 7y ago
Couldn't resist posting this excerpt: --- And while Boeing’s engineers toiled to get McDonnell’s lemon planes into the sky, their own hopes of designing a new plane to compete with Airbus, Boeing’s only global market rival, were shriveling. Under the sway of all the naysayers who had called out the folly of the McDonnell deal, the board had adopted a hard-line “never again” posture toward ambitious new planes. Boeing’s leaders began crying “crocodile tears,” Sorscher claimed, about the development costs of 1995’s 777, even though some industry insiders estimate that it became the most profitable plane of all time. The premise behind this complaining was silly, Sorscher contended in PowerPoint presentations and a Harvard Business School-style case study on the topic. A return to the “problem-solving” culture and managerial structure of yore, he explained over and over again to anyone who would listen, was the only sensible way to generate shareholder value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much more than an eye roll. “I’m not buying it,” was a common response. Occasionally, though, someone in the audience was outright mean, like the Wall Street analyst who cut him off mid-sentence: “Look, I get it. What you’re telling me is that your business is different. That you’re special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different.” And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.
- ptmcc 7y ago
  The 777 program is a case study in program management and engineering excellence, and that aircraft is still an amazing piece of quality design and engineering. It is so sad that the Boeing of those days is dead and buried. Everything since the MD takeover ("merger") has been a race to the bottom.
  - teachrdan 7y ago
    Might there be a literal case study of the 777? I read a book about the development of the 747 and it was absolutely fascinating--particularly the (now extinct?) Boeing obsession with engineering safety. [0] Jumbo: The Making of the Boeing 747 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22849121-jumbo https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22849121-jumbo
    - mannykannot 7y ago
      As you liked that, consider "Twenty-First-Century Jet: The Making and Marketing of the Boeing 777" by Karl Sabbagh. I believe there is also a video series from PBS. The 777 development program might have been Boeing's technical apotheosis.
      - markdown 7y ago
        For anyone else: "the highest point in the development of something; a culmination or climax."
      - sgnelson 7y ago
        The PBS documentary is linked in the above article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oyWZjdXxlw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oyWZjdXxlw with this quote: "There is a scene in the first episode of a five-part 1996 PBS series on the making of the 777, Boeing’s first plane to employ “fly-by-wire” technology, in which an engineer discusses the company’s philosophy of computer-assisted aviation: One of the things that we do in the basic design is the pilot always has the ultimate authority of control. There’s no computer on the airplane that he cannot override, or turn off if the ultimate comes, but, in terms of any of our features, even those that are built to prevent the airplane from stalling, which is the lowest speed you can fly and beyond which you would lose the control. We don’t inhibit that totally; we make it difficult, but if something in the box should inappropriately think that it’s stalling when it isn’t, the pilot can say, this is wrong and he can override it. That’s a fundamental difference in philosophy that we have versus some of the competition.
    - mbrodersen 7y ago
- kazen44 7y ago
  > And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse. But building airplanes has a far more direct consequence to people's lives then mortgage lending and other "pie in the sky" wallstreet mumbo jumbo. Not building a proper airplane results in preventable disasters, with a great loss of life and trust as a result.
  - xiphias2 7y ago
    Sadly with the current US health care system not having enough money for hospital visit may easily mean the loss of life. The only difference with airplanes is that it's much more visible, which means that it's harder to cheat.
petermcneeley 7y ago
Probably the most interesting and relevant part to HN > It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees
- dchichkov 7y ago
  Link to the original article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-... "Boeing said the company did not rely on engineers from HCL and Cyient for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which has been linked to the Lion Air crash last October and the Ethiopian Airlines disaster in March. The Chicago-based planemaker also said it didn’t rely on either firm for another software issue disclosed after the crashes: a cockpit warning light that wasn’t working for most buyers." but training HCL likely was taking tall: "Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL’s services at a San Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June. He said the company took no up-front payments on the 787 and only started collecting payments based on sales years later, an “innovative business model” he offered to extend to others in the industry. The 787 entered service three years late and billions of dollars over budget in 2011, in part because of confusion introduced by the outsourcing strategy. Under Dennis Muilenburg, a longtime Boeing engineer who became chief executive in 2015, the company has said that it planned to bring more work back in-house for its newest planes."
7532yahoogmail 7y ago
Lack of openness, and tolerance for politics at corporate offices ... jfk ... bane of many people's misery. VW is another one except that it was an on purpose.
jgeada 7y ago
You often hear about required ethics courses for engineers, but it strikes me that it is management that most requires this. The whole MBA thing & the implied notion of managerialism has been a straight up disaster to everything it has touched (other than, of course, the enriching of the 0.1%)
- dba7dba 7y ago
  Couldn't agree more. MBA grads in place of power have done so much damage to social fabric of US.
  - pstuart 7y ago
    Economic strip mining.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- clairity 7y ago
  your ire is poorly targeted. ethics is taught in mba programs. whether that translates into more ethical companies is certainly debatable, but don't simply assume mba holders are bad people (and engineers are good people). the reasons for the paucity of corporate ethical behavior is complex and varied, but certainly one cause is we've collectively capitulated to the supremacy of the profit motive, and there's just not enough perceived (direct) benefit in doing so.
  - human20190310 7y ago
    The ire is pointed in the right direction, but the issue isn't not rooted in ethics, it's rooted in measurability. Management decisions were made as if things that could not be measured could be disregarded. Surely someone must have had a vague sense that relying on $9 per hour software development might not be a wise choice, but in a "managerialistic" environment, the concrete cost savings are taken into account, and the vague sense is not.
jeanl 7y ago
I am as outraged at Boeing's ineptitude as anybody with a rational mind, but I can't read this kind of article without cringing. Sentences like "about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death" should raise alarm bells in any reader's mind. This is probably a writer who knows nothing about aviation and/or software engineering yet feels very comfortable calling a system "unthinkably stupid". This smacks of oversimplification and just plain sloppiness. There are many articles on the entire debacle that are a lot more measured, and smart about their analysis, including quite a few great reads that were mentioned here in HN.
- chroem- 7y ago
  I used to work as a controls engineer. Sensor fusion and redundancy is one of the most basic concepts in controls, and yet it was totally absent from a system that was responsible for flying the aircraft. There is more redundancy built into your office building's HVAC system than was built into the 737's MCAS. That really is inexcusable.
  - cmurf 7y ago
    Actually, per the article, the lack of redundancy was central to hiding the feature from the FAA, keeping it out of the FOM, and ensuring the avoidance of any scenario that would entail extra pilot training. Whether two or three sensors, any disagreement among them would have involved a more complex system, and would risk necessitating an in-cockpit notification of that disagreement, and the ensuing training so the pilots understand the exact consequences of the disagreement and a procedure for mitigating it. And the article explicitly dings Southwest Airlines as having provided Boeing a financial incentive to avoiding them needing additional simulator training.
    - mjevans 7y ago
      Indeed, it's the motive to have done things wrong rather than in any type of correct way.
    - 7y ago
ilaksh 7y ago
I think that a lot of times management believes it's only job is to cut corners. In those cases, maybe it's better not to have managers. Maybe if engineers were properly incentivized by profit sharing or something, they could help maximize profits without throwing out everything else like managers keep urging them to.
- generatorguy 7y ago
  Lawyers and accountants become partners in their firms and are incentivized to work towards the long term health of the firm so younger lawyers will buy in and they can retire and continue to enjoy the profits of the firm. What do Civil, mechanical, electrical, non-software Engineers have as a career path? None are in upper management. Maybe you get some stock options? You certainly don’t get to be in charge unless you start your own small, fledgling engineering company and then the chances are you only work on small projects since you aren’t big enough to sue if anything goes wrong you can’t get big contracts. Hoping someone can shed some light on another path for career professional engineers.
  - cco 7y ago
    I'm a big fan of the idea of codifying software "engineers" more clearly. When an architect, civil engineer, or doctor put their stamp on a job they are both civilally and in some cases criminally liable for that work. As such each profession has a professional society and legal framework for qualifying their members. If you are building a webapp, it's probably fine that you haven't taken an ethical code, been legally qualified to write the code, etc, but those "engineers" that write code that keeps airplanes in the air or driverless cars on the road have, in my opinion, crossed that line into actual engineering work and as such should hold themselves to the same standards as other professionals in the space. In the case of MCAS there would be a codebase with a signed commit by the responsible engineer, his or her name would be right there in bold when the first version was shipped and when hack upon hack was piled on. Of course this is no panacea but this has to be the way forward as software continues to extend it's reach into mission critical roles in our lives, right?
    - 7y ago
gmoore 7y ago
I think a much better view of the issue is in the NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...
cmurf 7y ago
Dup. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21014714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21014714
fallous 7y ago
Early in my career when I encountered outsourcing initiatives I perceived them as management choosing cost over quality. A couple of decades later my view has changed on that mostly thanks to having worked more directly within the management structure of numerous companies (ranging from startup to ConglomCo Megasized). In most cases those making the decision really believe they can achieve comparable results by outsourcing while also taking advantage of global wage differences and also converting the continual overhead of personnel into just-in-time overhead that only has to be taken on as needed. This is not unlike the devops trend towards using cloud-based infrastructure. The problem is that the thinking that you achieve comparable results by outsourcing is woefully naive. In-house teams have a vested interest in understanding the business problems as well as filling in the communications gap between what is asked for vs what is actually desired as an outcome. Outsourced contracted labor does not share those same interests. Additionally, when you outsource technical labor you MUST have the ability internally to create very good designs, specifications, and oversight/feedback mechanisms to ensure that you're getting what you wanted rather than what you asked for via sloppy communication. For those companies that have previously had internal teams and decide to transition to external resources they almost never have someone with that ability and in fact are unaware of the impedance mismatch between their asks and the results delivered by internal teams. Outsourcing means trading the overhead of personnel costs for the overhead of a much more complex and difficult communications burden. It is extraordinarily rare that the company that opts to transition from internal to outsourced talent has the capability or even awareness of that trade, resulting in predictably poor results.
- ScottBurson 7y ago
  This seems to happen when software companies start to be run by people who have never written code. (I'm sure the observation generalizes to other forms of engineering, but software is what I'm familiar with.) They tend to perceive the work through a very shallow lens. They see that time is spent and code is produced, and they think that that's the essence of the process. What they don't see is all the knowledge that goes into building systems that work well; they have none of that knowledge themselves, and so it's invisible to them. They don't know the difference between a well-written program and a badly-written one, so it's easy for them to think they're getting the same results for less money by outsourcing.
ineedasername 7y ago
> Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different. [from a wall street analyst about Boeing] This in a nutshell represents the core failure of modern managerial thinking. What started as "scientific management" many decades ago, an attempt to systematically understand how corporations should operate, quickly evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible & completely replaceable units of work-- that a "manager" could be trained up in various basic principles and plugged into any role There are of course commonalities across businesses, and commonalities across managers for necessary skill, but each business is, in some core, fundamental way, different from others. Good management of a company doesn't following a paint-by-numbers rule book, it requires deep understanding of the particulars of that business, the market & industry it operates in. I think this is changing, slowly, but the legacy of this flawed thinking is a long one.
- baybal2 7y ago
  > This in a nutshell represents the core failure of modern managerial thinking. What started as "scientific management" many decades ago, an attempt to systematically understand how corporations should operate, quickly evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible & completely replaceable units of work-- that a "manager" could be trained up in various basic principles and plugged into any role This is what I like about Chinese industry, for now... They have not yet got themselves into "scientific management" coolaid. "Sales call in the morning, prototypes in the evening" — says all about it. Find a single American electronics maker who can do that. The crisis in American corporate culture is that people can't find out what their company exceeds in. So much focus goes to MBA things, than whatever is company's main competence gets less and less clear. But in China, things crystal clear, for now: Factories compete on cheap widgets Engineering companies compete on TTM Lawyers compete on winning cases Car companies compete on horsepowers Advertising companies compete on being obnoxious Banks compete on cheaper loans No "strategic analysis" bullshit
  - ethbro 7y ago
    I expect the downvotes are because of the unmentioned "communist, single-party states are the essence of groupthink coolaid" elephant. But I doubt you're wrong on the engineering analysis. The physical world has the unique property of being unbeholden to vision. Either the widget works, or it doesn't. And in a marketplace with actual competition, you're going to have a lot of people working very hard to build a better widget.
tomohawk 7y ago
> It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that Such a non-insightful aside. Boeing produced many excellent planes, and during that time functioned quite well in a capitalist system. In fact, was enabled by it. As if a non-functioning managerial class never could happen in a socialist bureaucracy. Buying MD seems like it was mostly motivated by the profitability of defense contracts, which usually just end up distorting a company's priorities, and which are driven by decidedly non-capitalistic requirements of the military. HP avoided defense contracts for decades for this very reason. Hopefully Boeing will return to its capitalist roots and realize that it needs to use the capital it has to satisfy the needs of its customers by building great planes.
- V_Terranova_Jr 7y ago
  I work with these large aerospace primes and see no consistent display of vision, long-term thinking, or integrity among them. I'm not saying these qualities don't exist within their ranks, just that they never become overriding management values. Take a look at the qualifications of Lockheed Martin's CEO or the President of Boeing Defense & Space. Yet, as the article notes, despite being helmed by non-engineers in undoubtedly one of the most technically-demanding sectors in society, these companies are richly rewarded in the public marketplace. Wall Street clearly does not give a shit that these "leaders" don't even truly understand their products. Pretending that all these companies need to do is Adam Smith harder is crazy. As long as they have $300-$400+ share prices, there is no market incentive for them to not suck.
WalterBright 7y ago
On the other hand, "Air Disasters" S13 E2 is about the crash of an Airbus A300 that stalled and crashed. The reason was because Airbus changed the way the "go round" mode worked, and the pilots were not aware of it nor were trained on it. The pilots kept pushing the nose down and the automation kept pulling it up, until it crashed. Airbus also has an Airworthiness Directive out on it for pitch instability: " This AD was prompted by analysis of the behavior of the elevator aileron computer (ELAC) L102 that revealed that excessive pitch attitude can occur in certain conditions and during specific maneuvers. This AD requires revising the airplane flight manual (AFM) to incorporate updated procedures and operational limitations, as specified in a European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) AD, which is incorporated by reference. The FAA is issuing this AD to address the unsafe condition on these products." http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/0/6aeb8ae4513720768625845e00444321/$FILE/2019-15-02.pdf http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/...
- acqq 7y ago
  Somehow I miss how is S13 E2 in any way relevant to the topic of the article here discussed, which is, as far as I understand, just about the problems brought to Boeing by Boeing's own management.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    It's relevant in that Airbus management is not being raked over the coals for that disaster, which has many similarities.
    - acqq 7y ago
      Did they do their regulatory evaluation themselves, hiding what they produced, still claimed that what they did was "not important" after one crash, tried to blame the pilots, waited for a second crash, again claimed that it's the pilots responsible for the second crash, insisted for the planes to keep flying after the second crash? Was it all the effect of their decision to lie about the facts of design of the whole plane to everybody? I still consider what Boeing did hard to match with any other event, except maybe with some other Boeing actions.
joe_the_user 7y ago
Nearly TWO DECADES before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.” (Emphasis added). But, the situation is that US air travel got safer during a lot of those two decades. Indeed, the two crashes world aren't enough to push air travel back two decades and safety standards and the rarity of crashes were enough catch the problem. The 737 Max is a huge problem for Boeing in particular, creating a situation where the endgame is hard to see. But not as much for air travel generally, which continues to be cheap and safe. And Boeing made a lot of planes and lot of money in the last two decades. Which is to say when things are "pushed to boards", it's hard to say exactly when they give out. The 737 Max system was about minimizing costs everywhere in the system - costs in testing, costs in training and costs in operation. The multilevel Rube Goldberg approach finally failed but it's had a long run, the 737 800 is a workhorse of air travel. Still, I suppose the lesson is multilevel optimization can result in a catastrophic systems failure. There are probably much processes where this could happen - just think when all the cars are Internet connected.
mannykannot 7y ago
Also worth noting is the House Aviation Subcommittee's take on the problem: The panel’s majority members were best embodied by subcommittee Chairman Rick Larsen, an ex-lobbyist New Democrat who delivered an opening statement of head-scratching insipidness: “As I have said before, if the public does not feel safe about flying then they won’t fly; if they don’t fly, airlines don’t need to buy airplanes; if they don’t need to buy airplanes, then airplanes don’t need to be built; and if there is no need to build airplanes, then there will be no jobs in aviation.” Followed by Congressman Paul Mitchell's lambasting of Captain Dan Carey, the outgoing president of the Allied Pilots Association, for having the temerity to go public with his concerns: "What’s the value [of releasing a secret recording] to the system or the families?... Explain to me what warranted that, sir!" Clearly, the problem here is that the travelling public, and victims' families, have come to learn about MCAS and its role in recent crashes. When you are trying to spin a story, however, it can be difficult to keep it straight. Here's Sam Graves, ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee: “It’s not the plane I’m concerned about; I think the plane is very safe. We need to concentrate on the pilot ... being trained [for] the aircraft, and being able to fly a plane and not just fly the computer.” His blame-the-pilots rhetoric does not look so good for Boeing now that we are learning the lengths it went to in order to avoid there being any additional training for pilots.
- MaupitiBlue 7y ago
  Sam Graves is a commercially rated pilot.
  - yborg 7y ago
    >He graduated from the University of Missouri College of Agriculture in Columbia, Missouri with a degree in Agronomy.
- wbl 7y ago
  Quick the nose is pitching down and you didn't command it. What do you do? Flip the trim cutouts. True before MCAS true after.
markus_zhang 7y ago
Just a symptom of late stage Capitalism.
bogomipz 7y ago
The author states: >"Southwest always had a lot to say about projected modifications to the 737, and Kelleher’s team mostly wanted as few technical modifications as possible. With the MAX, they upped the ante: According to Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing employee, Boeing agreed to rebate Southwest $1 million for every MAX it bought, if the FAA required level-D simulator training for the carrier’s pilots" This seems like an important part of the story yet I'm not understanding if it's inclusion is meant to have significance to the tragedies of the 737. Could someone explain how of if this is germane to the crashes?
- detaro 7y ago
  It's an incentive to make the differences between the planes seem as minimal as possible and avoid pilots being properly informed about all the details of the system, leading to pilots not knowing why the plane does what it does and how to fix it when it goes wrong?
malshe 7y ago
This is a great article and now I am appalled at so many things. But the line that touched me profoundly is at the end where the father and the husband of 4 victims says this: “I am empty,” he told the committee. “My life has no meaning.” I can only imagine the pain he is experiencing.
rramadass 7y ago
Everybody should read David Packard's address to HP Managers in 1960. This was a time when HP was truly a great company. https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-our-company-5634378 https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-... To me, this is what i consider as true "Management" and not the BS that passes for it today.
rdtwo 7y ago
How can you guys take an article seriously that can’t even be bothered to get basic factual information correctly.
dingo_bat 7y ago
Everybody is blaming the MBAs here but I think engineers must share the blame equally. As an engineer, your job is not to do whatever your manager demands. If you are asked to do something that is not right, call it out, don't do it, try to convince people for the correct solution. Worst case scenario: quit the company. The engineers who designed and implemented the MCAS, whether at HCL or at Boeing, have blood on their hands, just like their managers all the way up to the CEO.
markhahn 7y ago
I like to imagine a fantasy United States where the FAA (et al) would have stepped in, removed all the MBAs, and set the company on a sane course. More practically, I wonder what could be done to create structural impediments to the kind of managerial death-cult described in the article. For instance, I see no reason a company should be allowed to buy its own stock. How about requiring corporate boards to have at least 51% of non-stockholders? We should remember that corporations are purely social constructs. There is no natural law that they must not be interfered with, that only market mechanisms should control then. We created corporations for social good, and can alter them.
sgt101 7y ago
The moral of this story seems to be "buy Airbus shares". Maybe Lockheed Martin will buy up Boeing as distressed assets and do something with it?
dredmorbius 7y ago
This call-out quote hits very close to home for me: You are in a mature industry that is no longer innovative; it’s a commodity business. The last great innovation capable of driving major growth in aviation was the jet engine back in the 1950s, and every technological advance since has been incremental. And so the emphasis of the business is going to switch away from engineering and toward supply-chain management. Because every mature company has to isolate which parts of its business add value, and delegate the more commoditylike things to the supply chain. The more you look to the market for pricing signals, the more the role of the engineer will shrink.

282 points by johnny313 7y ago

Couldn't resist posting this excerpt: --- And while Boeing’s engineers toiled to get McDonnell’s lemon planes into the sky, their own hopes of designing a new plane to compete with Airbus, Boeing’s only global market rival, were shriveling. Under the sway of all the naysayers who had called out the folly of the McDonnell deal, the board had adopted a hard-line “never again” posture toward ambitious new planes. Boeing’s leaders began crying “crocodile tears,” Sorscher claimed, about the development costs of 1995’s 777, even though some industry insiders estimate that it became the most profitable plane of all time. The premise behind this complaining was silly, Sorscher contended in PowerPoint presentations and a Harvard Business School-style case study on the topic. A return to the “problem-solving” culture and managerial structure of yore, he explained over and over again to anyone who would listen, was the only sensible way to generate shareholder value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much more than an eye roll. “I’m not buying it,” was a common response. Occasionally, though, someone in the audience was outright mean, like the Wall Street analyst who cut him off mid-sentence: “Look, I get it. What you’re telling me is that your business is different. That you’re special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different.” And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.

ptmcc 7y ago
The 777 program is a case study in program management and engineering excellence, and that aircraft is still an amazing piece of quality design and engineering. It is so sad that the Boeing of those days is dead and buried. Everything since the MD takeover ("merger") has been a race to the bottom.
- teachrdan 7y ago
  Might there be a literal case study of the 777? I read a book about the development of the 747 and it was absolutely fascinating--particularly the (now extinct?) Boeing obsession with engineering safety. [0] Jumbo: The Making of the Boeing 747 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22849121-jumbo https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22849121-jumbo
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    As you liked that, consider "Twenty-First-Century Jet: The Making and Marketing of the Boeing 777" by Karl Sabbagh. I believe there is also a video series from PBS. The 777 development program might have been Boeing's technical apotheosis.
    - markdown 7y ago
      For anyone else: "the highest point in the development of something; a culmination or climax."
    - sgnelson 7y ago
      The PBS documentary is linked in the above article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oyWZjdXxlw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oyWZjdXxlw with this quote: "There is a scene in the first episode of a five-part 1996 PBS series on the making of the 777, Boeing’s first plane to employ “fly-by-wire” technology, in which an engineer discusses the company’s philosophy of computer-assisted aviation: One of the things that we do in the basic design is the pilot always has the ultimate authority of control. There’s no computer on the airplane that he cannot override, or turn off if the ultimate comes, but, in terms of any of our features, even those that are built to prevent the airplane from stalling, which is the lowest speed you can fly and beyond which you would lose the control. We don’t inhibit that totally; we make it difficult, but if something in the box should inappropriately think that it’s stalling when it isn’t, the pilot can say, this is wrong and he can override it. That’s a fundamental difference in philosophy that we have versus some of the competition.
  - mbrodersen 7y ago
kazen44 7y ago
> And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse. But building airplanes has a far more direct consequence to people's lives then mortgage lending and other "pie in the sky" wallstreet mumbo jumbo. Not building a proper airplane results in preventable disasters, with a great loss of life and trust as a result.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  Sadly with the current US health care system not having enough money for hospital visit may easily mean the loss of life. The only difference with airplanes is that it's much more visible, which means that it's harder to cheat.

petermcneeley 7y ago

Probably the most interesting and relevant part to HN > It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees

dchichkov 7y ago
Link to the original article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-... "Boeing said the company did not rely on engineers from HCL and Cyient for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which has been linked to the Lion Air crash last October and the Ethiopian Airlines disaster in March. The Chicago-based planemaker also said it didn’t rely on either firm for another software issue disclosed after the crashes: a cockpit warning light that wasn’t working for most buyers." but training HCL likely was taking tall: "Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL’s services at a San Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June. He said the company took no up-front payments on the 787 and only started collecting payments based on sales years later, an “innovative business model” he offered to extend to others in the industry. The 787 entered service three years late and billions of dollars over budget in 2011, in part because of confusion introduced by the outsourcing strategy. Under Dennis Muilenburg, a longtime Boeing engineer who became chief executive in 2015, the company has said that it planned to bring more work back in-house for its newest planes."

7532yahoogmail 7y ago

Lack of openness, and tolerance for politics at corporate offices ... jfk ... bane of many people's misery. VW is another one except that it was an on purpose.

jgeada 7y ago

You often hear about required ethics courses for engineers, but it strikes me that it is management that most requires this. The whole MBA thing & the implied notion of managerialism has been a straight up disaster to everything it has touched (other than, of course, the enriching of the 0.1%)

dba7dba 7y ago
Couldn't agree more. MBA grads in place of power have done so much damage to social fabric of US.
- pstuart 7y ago
  Economic strip mining.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
clairity 7y ago
your ire is poorly targeted. ethics is taught in mba programs. whether that translates into more ethical companies is certainly debatable, but don't simply assume mba holders are bad people (and engineers are good people). the reasons for the paucity of corporate ethical behavior is complex and varied, but certainly one cause is we've collectively capitulated to the supremacy of the profit motive, and there's just not enough perceived (direct) benefit in doing so.
- human20190310 7y ago
  The ire is pointed in the right direction, but the issue isn't not rooted in ethics, it's rooted in measurability. Management decisions were made as if things that could not be measured could be disregarded. Surely someone must have had a vague sense that relying on $9 per hour software development might not be a wise choice, but in a "managerialistic" environment, the concrete cost savings are taken into account, and the vague sense is not.

jeanl 7y ago

I am as outraged at Boeing's ineptitude as anybody with a rational mind, but I can't read this kind of article without cringing. Sentences like "about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death" should raise alarm bells in any reader's mind. This is probably a writer who knows nothing about aviation and/or software engineering yet feels very comfortable calling a system "unthinkably stupid". This smacks of oversimplification and just plain sloppiness. There are many articles on the entire debacle that are a lot more measured, and smart about their analysis, including quite a few great reads that were mentioned here in HN.

chroem- 7y ago
I used to work as a controls engineer. Sensor fusion and redundancy is one of the most basic concepts in controls, and yet it was totally absent from a system that was responsible for flying the aircraft. There is more redundancy built into your office building's HVAC system than was built into the 737's MCAS. That really is inexcusable.
- cmurf 7y ago
  Actually, per the article, the lack of redundancy was central to hiding the feature from the FAA, keeping it out of the FOM, and ensuring the avoidance of any scenario that would entail extra pilot training. Whether two or three sensors, any disagreement among them would have involved a more complex system, and would risk necessitating an in-cockpit notification of that disagreement, and the ensuing training so the pilots understand the exact consequences of the disagreement and a procedure for mitigating it. And the article explicitly dings Southwest Airlines as having provided Boeing a financial incentive to avoiding them needing additional simulator training.
  - mjevans 7y ago
    Indeed, it's the motive to have done things wrong rather than in any type of correct way.
  - 7y ago

ilaksh 7y ago

I think that a lot of times management believes it's only job is to cut corners. In those cases, maybe it's better not to have managers. Maybe if engineers were properly incentivized by profit sharing or something, they could help maximize profits without throwing out everything else like managers keep urging them to.

generatorguy 7y ago
Lawyers and accountants become partners in their firms and are incentivized to work towards the long term health of the firm so younger lawyers will buy in and they can retire and continue to enjoy the profits of the firm. What do Civil, mechanical, electrical, non-software Engineers have as a career path? None are in upper management. Maybe you get some stock options? You certainly don’t get to be in charge unless you start your own small, fledgling engineering company and then the chances are you only work on small projects since you aren’t big enough to sue if anything goes wrong you can’t get big contracts. Hoping someone can shed some light on another path for career professional engineers.
- cco 7y ago
  I'm a big fan of the idea of codifying software "engineers" more clearly. When an architect, civil engineer, or doctor put their stamp on a job they are both civilally and in some cases criminally liable for that work. As such each profession has a professional society and legal framework for qualifying their members. If you are building a webapp, it's probably fine that you haven't taken an ethical code, been legally qualified to write the code, etc, but those "engineers" that write code that keeps airplanes in the air or driverless cars on the road have, in my opinion, crossed that line into actual engineering work and as such should hold themselves to the same standards as other professionals in the space. In the case of MCAS there would be a codebase with a signed commit by the responsible engineer, his or her name would be right there in bold when the first version was shipped and when hack upon hack was piled on. Of course this is no panacea but this has to be the way forward as software continues to extend it's reach into mission critical roles in our lives, right?
  - 7y ago

gmoore 7y ago

I think a much better view of the issue is in the NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...

cmurf 7y ago

Dup. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21014714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21014714

fallous 7y ago

Early in my career when I encountered outsourcing initiatives I perceived them as management choosing cost over quality. A couple of decades later my view has changed on that mostly thanks to having worked more directly within the management structure of numerous companies (ranging from startup to ConglomCo Megasized). In most cases those making the decision really believe they can achieve comparable results by outsourcing while also taking advantage of global wage differences and also converting the continual overhead of personnel into just-in-time overhead that only has to be taken on as needed. This is not unlike the devops trend towards using cloud-based infrastructure. The problem is that the thinking that you achieve comparable results by outsourcing is woefully naive. In-house teams have a vested interest in understanding the business problems as well as filling in the communications gap between what is asked for vs what is actually desired as an outcome. Outsourced contracted labor does not share those same interests. Additionally, when you outsource technical labor you MUST have the ability internally to create very good designs, specifications, and oversight/feedback mechanisms to ensure that you're getting what you wanted rather than what you asked for via sloppy communication. For those companies that have previously had internal teams and decide to transition to external resources they almost never have someone with that ability and in fact are unaware of the impedance mismatch between their asks and the results delivered by internal teams. Outsourcing means trading the overhead of personnel costs for the overhead of a much more complex and difficult communications burden. It is extraordinarily rare that the company that opts to transition from internal to outsourced talent has the capability or even awareness of that trade, resulting in predictably poor results.

ScottBurson 7y ago
This seems to happen when software companies start to be run by people who have never written code. (I'm sure the observation generalizes to other forms of engineering, but software is what I'm familiar with.) They tend to perceive the work through a very shallow lens. They see that time is spent and code is produced, and they think that that's the essence of the process. What they don't see is all the knowledge that goes into building systems that work well; they have none of that knowledge themselves, and so it's invisible to them. They don't know the difference between a well-written program and a badly-written one, so it's easy for them to think they're getting the same results for less money by outsourcing.

ineedasername 7y ago

> Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different. [from a wall street analyst about Boeing] This in a nutshell represents the core failure of modern managerial thinking. What started as "scientific management" many decades ago, an attempt to systematically understand how corporations should operate, quickly evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible & completely replaceable units of work-- that a "manager" could be trained up in various basic principles and plugged into any role There are of course commonalities across businesses, and commonalities across managers for necessary skill, but each business is, in some core, fundamental way, different from others. Good management of a company doesn't following a paint-by-numbers rule book, it requires deep understanding of the particulars of that business, the market & industry it operates in. I think this is changing, slowly, but the legacy of this flawed thinking is a long one.

baybal2 7y ago
> This in a nutshell represents the core failure of modern managerial thinking. What started as "scientific management" many decades ago, an attempt to systematically understand how corporations should operate, quickly evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible & completely replaceable units of work-- that a "manager" could be trained up in various basic principles and plugged into any role This is what I like about Chinese industry, for now... They have not yet got themselves into "scientific management" coolaid. "Sales call in the morning, prototypes in the evening" — says all about it. Find a single American electronics maker who can do that. The crisis in American corporate culture is that people can't find out what their company exceeds in. So much focus goes to MBA things, than whatever is company's main competence gets less and less clear. But in China, things crystal clear, for now: Factories compete on cheap widgets Engineering companies compete on TTM Lawyers compete on winning cases Car companies compete on horsepowers Advertising companies compete on being obnoxious Banks compete on cheaper loans No "strategic analysis" bullshit
- ethbro 7y ago
  I expect the downvotes are because of the unmentioned "communist, single-party states are the essence of groupthink coolaid" elephant. But I doubt you're wrong on the engineering analysis. The physical world has the unique property of being unbeholden to vision. Either the widget works, or it doesn't. And in a marketplace with actual competition, you're going to have a lot of people working very hard to build a better widget.

tomohawk 7y ago

> It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that Such a non-insightful aside. Boeing produced many excellent planes, and during that time functioned quite well in a capitalist system. In fact, was enabled by it. As if a non-functioning managerial class never could happen in a socialist bureaucracy. Buying MD seems like it was mostly motivated by the profitability of defense contracts, which usually just end up distorting a company's priorities, and which are driven by decidedly non-capitalistic requirements of the military. HP avoided defense contracts for decades for this very reason. Hopefully Boeing will return to its capitalist roots and realize that it needs to use the capital it has to satisfy the needs of its customers by building great planes.

V_Terranova_Jr 7y ago
I work with these large aerospace primes and see no consistent display of vision, long-term thinking, or integrity among them. I'm not saying these qualities don't exist within their ranks, just that they never become overriding management values. Take a look at the qualifications of Lockheed Martin's CEO or the President of Boeing Defense & Space. Yet, as the article notes, despite being helmed by non-engineers in undoubtedly one of the most technically-demanding sectors in society, these companies are richly rewarded in the public marketplace. Wall Street clearly does not give a shit that these "leaders" don't even truly understand their products. Pretending that all these companies need to do is Adam Smith harder is crazy. As long as they have $300-$400+ share prices, there is no market incentive for them to not suck.

WalterBright 7y ago

On the other hand, "Air Disasters" S13 E2 is about the crash of an Airbus A300 that stalled and crashed. The reason was because Airbus changed the way the "go round" mode worked, and the pilots were not aware of it nor were trained on it. The pilots kept pushing the nose down and the automation kept pulling it up, until it crashed. Airbus also has an Airworthiness Directive out on it for pitch instability: " This AD was prompted by analysis of the behavior of the elevator aileron computer (ELAC) L102 that revealed that excessive pitch attitude can occur in certain conditions and during specific maneuvers. This AD requires revising the airplane flight manual (AFM) to incorporate updated procedures and operational limitations, as specified in a European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) AD, which is incorporated by reference. The FAA is issuing this AD to address the unsafe condition on these products." http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/0/6aeb8ae4513720768625845e00444321/$FILE/2019-15-02.pdf http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/...

acqq 7y ago
Somehow I miss how is S13 E2 in any way relevant to the topic of the article here discussed, which is, as far as I understand, just about the problems brought to Boeing by Boeing's own management.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  It's relevant in that Airbus management is not being raked over the coals for that disaster, which has many similarities.
  - acqq 7y ago
    Did they do their regulatory evaluation themselves, hiding what they produced, still claimed that what they did was "not important" after one crash, tried to blame the pilots, waited for a second crash, again claimed that it's the pilots responsible for the second crash, insisted for the planes to keep flying after the second crash? Was it all the effect of their decision to lie about the facts of design of the whole plane to everybody? I still consider what Boeing did hard to match with any other event, except maybe with some other Boeing actions.

joe_the_user 7y ago

Nearly TWO DECADES before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.” (Emphasis added). But, the situation is that US air travel got safer during a lot of those two decades. Indeed, the two crashes world aren't enough to push air travel back two decades and safety standards and the rarity of crashes were enough catch the problem. The 737 Max is a huge problem for Boeing in particular, creating a situation where the endgame is hard to see. But not as much for air travel generally, which continues to be cheap and safe. And Boeing made a lot of planes and lot of money in the last two decades. Which is to say when things are "pushed to boards", it's hard to say exactly when they give out. The 737 Max system was about minimizing costs everywhere in the system - costs in testing, costs in training and costs in operation. The multilevel Rube Goldberg approach finally failed but it's had a long run, the 737 800 is a workhorse of air travel. Still, I suppose the lesson is multilevel optimization can result in a catastrophic systems failure. There are probably much processes where this could happen - just think when all the cars are Internet connected.

mannykannot 7y ago

Also worth noting is the House Aviation Subcommittee's take on the problem: The panel’s majority members were best embodied by subcommittee Chairman Rick Larsen, an ex-lobbyist New Democrat who delivered an opening statement of head-scratching insipidness: “As I have said before, if the public does not feel safe about flying then they won’t fly; if they don’t fly, airlines don’t need to buy airplanes; if they don’t need to buy airplanes, then airplanes don’t need to be built; and if there is no need to build airplanes, then there will be no jobs in aviation.” Followed by Congressman Paul Mitchell's lambasting of Captain Dan Carey, the outgoing president of the Allied Pilots Association, for having the temerity to go public with his concerns: "What’s the value [of releasing a secret recording] to the system or the families?... Explain to me what warranted that, sir!" Clearly, the problem here is that the travelling public, and victims' families, have come to learn about MCAS and its role in recent crashes. When you are trying to spin a story, however, it can be difficult to keep it straight. Here's Sam Graves, ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee: “It’s not the plane I’m concerned about; I think the plane is very safe. We need to concentrate on the pilot ... being trained [for] the aircraft, and being able to fly a plane and not just fly the computer.” His blame-the-pilots rhetoric does not look so good for Boeing now that we are learning the lengths it went to in order to avoid there being any additional training for pilots.

MaupitiBlue 7y ago
Sam Graves is a commercially rated pilot.
- yborg 7y ago
  >He graduated from the University of Missouri College of Agriculture in Columbia, Missouri with a degree in Agronomy.
wbl 7y ago
Quick the nose is pitching down and you didn't command it. What do you do? Flip the trim cutouts. True before MCAS true after.

markus_zhang 7y ago

Just a symptom of late stage Capitalism.

bogomipz 7y ago

The author states: >"Southwest always had a lot to say about projected modifications to the 737, and Kelleher’s team mostly wanted as few technical modifications as possible. With the MAX, they upped the ante: According to Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing employee, Boeing agreed to rebate Southwest $1 million for every MAX it bought, if the FAA required level-D simulator training for the carrier’s pilots" This seems like an important part of the story yet I'm not understanding if it's inclusion is meant to have significance to the tragedies of the 737. Could someone explain how of if this is germane to the crashes?

detaro 7y ago
It's an incentive to make the differences between the planes seem as minimal as possible and avoid pilots being properly informed about all the details of the system, leading to pilots not knowing why the plane does what it does and how to fix it when it goes wrong?

malshe 7y ago

This is a great article and now I am appalled at so many things. But the line that touched me profoundly is at the end where the father and the husband of 4 victims says this: “I am empty,” he told the committee. “My life has no meaning.” I can only imagine the pain he is experiencing.

rramadass 7y ago

Everybody should read David Packard's address to HP Managers in 1960. This was a time when HP was truly a great company. https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-our-company-5634378 https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-... To me, this is what i consider as true "Management" and not the BS that passes for it today.

rdtwo 7y ago

How can you guys take an article seriously that can’t even be bothered to get basic factual information correctly.

dingo_bat 7y ago

Everybody is blaming the MBAs here but I think engineers must share the blame equally. As an engineer, your job is not to do whatever your manager demands. If you are asked to do something that is not right, call it out, don't do it, try to convince people for the correct solution. Worst case scenario: quit the company. The engineers who designed and implemented the MCAS, whether at HCL or at Boeing, have blood on their hands, just like their managers all the way up to the CEO.

markhahn 7y ago

I like to imagine a fantasy United States where the FAA (et al) would have stepped in, removed all the MBAs, and set the company on a sane course. More practically, I wonder what could be done to create structural impediments to the kind of managerial death-cult described in the article. For instance, I see no reason a company should be allowed to buy its own stock. How about requiring corporate boards to have at least 51% of non-stockholders? We should remember that corporations are purely social constructs. There is no natural law that they must not be interfered with, that only market mechanisms should control then. We created corporations for social good, and can alter them.

sgt101 7y ago

The moral of this story seems to be "buy Airbus shares". Maybe Lockheed Martin will buy up Boeing as distressed assets and do something with it?

dredmorbius 7y ago

This call-out quote hits very close to home for me: You are in a mature industry that is no longer innovative; it’s a commodity business. The last great innovation capable of driving major growth in aviation was the jet engine back in the 1950s, and every technological advance since has been incremental. And so the emphasis of the business is going to switch away from engineering and toward supply-chain management. Because every mature company has to isolate which parts of its business add value, and delegate the more commoditylike things to the supply chain. The more you look to the market for pricing signals, the more the role of the engineer will shrink.