Interesting post.
There was also the 737 rudder hard-over issue of a few years ago that was extremely concerning and seemed not to get the attention from the FAA that has now been bought on by these two Max crashes.
The whole Sonic Cruiser/787 episode also seemed like quite a corporate mess. The Sonic Cruiser was a bizarre idea in that there was a marginal speed increase for a whole bunch of effort and extra fuel burn. It morphed into the 787 which was a shambles of a production process. It was probably a good idea to decentralise a bit and have external parties make components but that needed superior management oversight which clearly didn’t happen.
Joe Sutter correctly commented that with simple slide-rules, his team of engineers created a breakthrough and brilliant aircraft in the 747 in a very short timeframe. 40 years later, 787 engineers with the aid of super-computers couldn’t make yet another subsonic aluminum tube without extensive and expensive delays. Not their fault but evidence of poor management. After the battery fires that afflicted that aircraft (if my info is correct), the 787 still flies around with thick and heavy protective battery boxes far heavier than if they’d used traditional batteries in the first place. Ground Engineers tell me that to this day they have troubles with the 787 electrical system, particularly in hot weather when the system is under stress.
Time will tell, but the lack of aircrew-available information about the MCAS system and the fact that it had no redundancy (if these points are correct) is seemingly an appalling oversight.
There may be more to this than meets the eye but from an outsider’s standpoint, this all smacks of very poor upper level management and oversight. Great company and hopefully this latest event is a wake up call to both managers and the FAA overseers.