Don't forget somebody blowing the whistle to the hierarchy and a middle-mangler (of justice) "losing" the call. Feynman recounts multiple instances of manglement ignoring or railroading warnings and whistleblowing from engineers and workers, both in and out of NASA, when they didn't fail to consult with their report entirely.
Here's a verbatim quote from "Why do you care what other people think" (norton paperback, page 185)
> When I left the meeting, I had the definite impression that I had found the same game as with the seals: management reducing criteria and accepting more and more errors that weren't designed into the device, while the engineers are screaming from below, "HELP!" and "This is a RED ALERT!"
And top manglement may not only know (and not care) about the issues but cause them, see this other quote a few pages further (194) in the Software Group section (Feynman had been very impressed — positively — by the engineering discipline of the shuttle software group)
> One guy muttered something about higher-ups in NASA wanting to cut back on testing to save money: "They keep saying we always pass the tests, so what's the use of having so many?"
> the point is, the workers were thinking! I got the impression that they were not undisciplined; they were very interested in what they were doing, but they weren't given much encouragement. Nobody was paying much attention to them. It was remarkable that their morale was as high as it was under the circumstances.
Apathy is defined as a lack of interest, enthusiasm or concern, the text I quote is about Feynman finding none of these lacking.
The CEO created pressure with his ambition for VW to become the world's largest auto manufacturer; meanwhile the company had a culture and structure that would allow for shortcuts to be taken.
engineers are know to know how to calculate an engine efficiency. this is not the 60's and they can have a pretty decent knowledge of an engine performance profile by their simulations and knowledge of previous iterations of the same engines.
if this really was an internal 'conspiracy' it should have run from the engine engineers of this engine iteration, the previous iteration, the software developers that touched near the code, all the testers testing that software code, all the qa that ran the endless benches run for the engine to qualify for robustness (a very tight and monitor environment [1]), whomever touched that data afterward etc etc.
[1] think like this, photi not actual wv center: http://assets.slate.wvu.edu/resources/1117/1304968590.jpg
Someone, somewhere, either felt like they couldn't blow the whistle without getting fired (obviously a problem) or management knew about the rule breaking and just didn't care (which is a bigger problem.)