The McDonnell Douglas-Boeing merger led to the 737 Max crisis

Re:The McDonnell Douglas-Boeing merger led to the 737 Max cr... by carlmr on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @02:04AM (#21977689)

>The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.

If you ask me this is a problem in every highly regulated industry. You often find that the regulations have exceptions for smaller changes. What then happens is that you have many tiny changes that are made to fly under the radar, because it's unduly expensive to recertify after a big change. This makes it impossible to do big changes that are necessary to get rid of technical debt. Since it's impossible to get management approval for these. And technical debt keeps on building up.

If the incentives were more continuous (not sure how this is possible), instead of abruptly changing (no training <-> full training dichotomy), then we would see fewer of these cases.

So cases like this become a question of certain cost vs. risky reward (cheating or other hacky solutions). And if you've already invested in a few hacky solutions and not been caught, then the incremental risk seems to go lower, while the abrupt cost change stays the same.

It also goes hand in hand with the normalization of deviance (https://danluu.com/wat/).

If everything you've done for the last 60 years is incrementally adding hacks to the 737, then the one on the 737 MAX doesn't seem crazy anymore.

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Re:The McDonnell Douglas-Boeing merger led to the 737 Max cr... by kd5bjo on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @03:12AM (#21978032)

> If you ask me this is a problem in every highly regulated industry. You often find that the regulations have exceptions for smaller changes.

Another example of this is getting planning permission to build a house. Renovations are generally easier to get approved than new construction and keep any variances that have already been granted, so you’ll occasionally see someone “renovate” a house by tearing down everyrhing except for a single wall and building completely new otherwise.

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Re:The McDonnell Douglas-Boeing merger led to the 737 Max cr... by Arn_Thor on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @04:05AM (#21978272)

I think part of the problem is the focus on the financial figures for the next shareholder call. With a significantly longer time horizon it would be easy to justify investment in a total redesign, because it would lead to a number of cost savings down the line as technical debt was eliminated. And all for the low, low price of one comprehensive new government approval.

Instead it seems the goal was to get a moderately viable product to market as fast as possible, and the fastest and cheapest way was force some changes and fly under the regulators' radar.

That's at least one alternative perspective worth considering.

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