MAX’s Return Delayed by FAA Reevaluation of 737 Safety Procedures

[OldnGrounded]

Rather a different take than the Langewiesche piece

From the latest New Republic:

CRASH COURSE: How Boeing's Managerial Revolution Created the 737 MAX Disaster

Nearly two decades before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bull****, a culture of groupthink.”


Sorscher, a physicist who’d worked at Boeing more than two decades and had led negotiations there for the engineers’ union, had become obsessed with management culture. He said he didn’t previously imagine Boeing’s brave new managerial caste creating a problem as dumb and glaringly obvious as MCAS (or the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, as a handful of software wizards had dubbed it). But he knew the culture was going to down a plane at some point, that it was inevitable. He actually wrote about this in one of his reports that no one read.


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