Originally Posted by
bud leon
It's utter nonsense for many reasons, not least because of this odd idea that getting an MBA turns humans into sociopaths. All this rhetoric about bean counting, criticism of an aviation culture that has become one in which the industry doesn't care if people die, that pilots can't fly planes any more, and that technology has made planes unsafe, flies in the face of aviation safety statistics which show a continuous reduction in fatality frequency that any industry would be immensely proud of.
We simply do not live in a world in which humans don't make mistakes. To err is human. We must always learn from mistakes, and the history of aviation safety is an exemplar of that. Excluding malicious acts, every single death in the history of travel has occurred because one or more people made a mistake in strategy, decision making, design, or operation. It's quite possible that the Max story is going to become a classic safety case study. But witch hunting doesn't get us anywhere.
So the statistics of which you speak saw the Challenger launch successfully 10 times.
So the statistics of which you speak saw the 737 MAX fly successfully until it didn't last year. Statistically, extrapolating the hull loss of the 737 MAX indicates that the hull loss rate is now intolerable.
So which statistical data set is the valid sample?
The focus of the post graduate program in the modern age is to be relevant to business. Perpetual profit in a finite world is utter nonsense, yet every graduate is taught grow revenue and cut cost. Seemingly inexhaustible right?
How low can cost be cut before it matters? An endless loop question?
Nobody stated the graduates were sociopaths, that is alarmist. What is obvious to those of us who witness it is that these graduates know little of process, know little of design. Their skill set can be readily applied to any corporate endeavour. After all it is marketed as an Masters of Business Administration (Generic) One size fits all.
The normalisation of deviance is not a witch hunt, it is a scientific investigation into acceptance of deviance from safe practice.
The deviation takes place an increment at a time. Boeing engineers foretold their concerns about Boeing. The very people charged with building the product stated the process had been compromised.
Their focus was not to be quality, rather schedule and self evidently cost.
Management documents state that clearly,
deviation from accepted quality was permitted to protect schedule. Not the 737 MAX program incidentally, it was the 787.
Similarly, the NASA engineers had their concerns with O-Ring by pass. As did the engineers of Morton Thiokol.
Progam management dismissed their concerns, focused on schedule and budget.
Sound familiar?
Program cost, budgets, schedule and commercial viability overcame opposition from concerns for launch integrity. Everybody knows what happened next.
The case study of which you speak need not have been the 737 MAX. People made mistakes in design, strategy, decision making and operation.
The Boeing 787 program had all the hallmarks, the engineers in Boeing noticed the change, they called out the deviance. Statistically they have gotten away with it so far.
Perhaps the 737 MAX need not be a case study, the Challenger Launch Decision shows the template to anybody bothered enough to read it, having read it, the similarities are stark.
If this horrible loss of life was triggered by the same system that is believed responsible for the Lion Air accident, then statistically Boeing is going to have a hard time pointing to their statistics.