How Boeing and the F.A.A. Created the 737 MAX Catastrophe
The ultimate cause of the disaster was the drive to raise profits at any cost—and the cult of the stock price, to which so many venerable companies have conceded.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-boeing-and-the-faa-created-the-737-max-catastrophe
In 2013, for example, a Boeing engineer suggested installing a computer-based airspeed indicator to supplement the 737 max’s single external speed sensor, the faulty operation of which is suspected of triggering the mcas in the two deadly crashes: Lion Air Flight 610, on October 29, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, on March 10, 2019. The engineer’s request “was rejected by Boeing management due to cost concerns and because adding synthetic airspeed could have jeopardized the 737 MAX program’s directive to avoid pilot simulator training requirements,” the report says. If Boeing had told airlines that their pilots would need extensive retraining to fly the new planes, including instruction on how to react to an activation of the mcas, the airlines might have been less eager to order them. Not only did Boeing neglect to inform the airlines about the new feature, but it removed any references to the mcas from the operations manual that pilots of the 737 max relied on.