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.
[0] Jumbo: The Making of the Boeing 747
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.
Anyway, the plane had a very different control architecture from previous Boeing planes, including more reliance on software. The FAA was concerned about the software, and the possibility of a software failure taking out all three instances of some of the redundant systems. The FAA normally required a lot more testing of such software than would fit with the schedule Boeing wanted. Boeing and the FAA agreed that in these systems, the three instances would run separate implementations of the software, writing by separate development teams working from a common spec, but not sharing anything else. The FAA would then allow the software to be deployed on the accelerated schedule Boeing wanted.
This turned out to take longer than Boeing expected, and started threatening to delay the schedule, and hurt Boeing's chances against the newest Airbus plane that was aiming for a similar market. Politicians got word of this, and the FAA was successfully pressured into relaxing the redundancy requirements, letting Boeing go ahead with running the same brand new software on all instances of the redundant systems.
The software turned out fine, so this worked out, but it still was a dangerous shortcut that the FAA allowed (or was forced to allow) that put competing with Airbus over safety. So I'm not sure things were actually all that different in the '90s. They just were luckier.
Formal unit testing is another idea that turns out to be relatively low value but is widely regarded as a best practice.
IIRC NASA studied both of these, but I dont have a reference.
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.
The only difference with airplanes is that it's much more visible, which means that it's harder to cheat.
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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.