https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
>With ethics now front and center, Condit was forced out and replaced with Stonecipher, who promptly affirmed: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
But I think it's worth noting to the (mostly software oriented) HN crowd - aerospace projects have massive manufacturing cycle times. Some things literally take years to manufacture for the proof-of-concept stage, let alone production. You can't NOT be incredibly schedule-oriented in this environment. This can cause some perverse incentives for management (which must be mitigated), but there are always going to be somewhat risky last-minute changes that could seem ill-advised in hindsight if you want to deliver something.
I generally agree strongly (e.g. car vs air safety). Though this group is highly cognizant of KNOWN risks. It's the UNKNOWN risks (usually found at those interfaces I mentioned above) that get overlooked. Unknown risks definitely will be more problematic in a compressed-schedule environment.
Required, not optional if the customer pays enough.
I dont understand much of redundancy of sensors, yet '3' would allow to ignore the 'bogus' reading.
The main new feature in a plane solving a problem that they knew was potentially dangerous which is why they had to install the auto-nose-down system in the first place.
How expensive could a couple of extra sensors even be compared to a whole plane?
Not knowing the angle of attack is miles better than not knowing that you don't know the angle of attack.
This would be fine if we're talking about carpeting on the flight deck, but the AOC sensor is a critical feature.
If I were a betting person, my guess is they have created a culture of “schedule first”. Other orgs managed by engineers have been chastised for this in the past (looking at you, NASA). The problem is the risk/reward is asymmetrical managing these projects. Even though the severity can be extremely high, the probabilities of an error of this magnitude tend to be very small. This creates an incentive for ambitious souls to be aggressive and continually role the dice to meet schedule. As a former manager once told me when I was in a safety role, “you don’t want to get a reputation for slowing things down.”
To oversimplify things, say there’s a 1% chance any project can end in disaster. You can literally create an entire career ignoring that risk and still look like a star. Probability is on the individuals side. Meanwhile, the manager pushing to do things the right way to minimize that risk almost certainly will bear a higher cost/schedule burden. But in aggregate, that probability will catch up to the organization.
What makes me think this? There’s ample reporting Boeing didn’t follow their own procedures because they didn’t want to delay. Hazard analysis documentation wasn’t reflective of the design because the paperwork wasn’t getting updated. Their didn’t follow their own procedures regarding redundancy in design of items identified in the HA. I suspect they knew this was wrong which is why they obfuscated details in the investigation.
Culture matters, irrespective of academic degrees.