Originally Posted by
Speed of Sound
What has always bothered me right from the beginning of this whole thing is that at some point in the design process the one, two, three or synthetic AoA input question must have come up. And when it did, surely someone put their hand up and said “With only one AoA vane feeding the FCC, an early failure of the sensor will only come to light when either the AP is switched off and/or the flaps are retracted. This really is not the time/speed/altitude/phase of flight to have large amounts of AND.”
Given that it is unthinkable that all potential outcomes weren’t modelled, who on earth decided that this was an acceptable risk to take? 😵
A profound question, answered almost immediately by the next post:
Originally Posted by
brak
To quote myself from a
previous thread:
And now
this from the news:
"Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India.In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max."
When reality is stranger than an ironic post.
Further down in that article:
“Boeing was doing all kinds of things, everything you can imagine, to reduce cost, including moving work from Puget Sound, because we’d become very expensive here,” said Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer laid off in 2017. “All that’s very understandable if you think of it from a business perspective. Slowly over time it appears that’s eroded the ability for Puget Sound designers to design.”Rabin, the former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature. “I was shocked that in a room full of a couple hundred mostly senior engineers we were being told that we weren’t needed,” said Rabin, who was laid off in 2015.
The Max became Boeing’s top seller soon after it was offered in 2011. But for ambitious engineers, it was something of a “backwater,” said Peter Lemme, who designed the 767’s automated flight controls and is now a consultant. The Max was an update of a 50-year-old design, and the changes needed to be limited enough that Boeing could produce the new planes like cookie cutters, with few changes for either the assembly line or airlines. “As an engineer that’s not the greatest job,” he said.
Short answer: There was no-one in charge! The hot-potato was passed around in circles, until the design worked (sort-of). No-one thought through all the implications, and tested all of the systems, until it was already airborne.