This incident makes me reconsider American style capitalism. The pressure to cut corners is always there, but I thought that in any large reputable corporation there would be enough people with integrity to ensure that the really bad stuff wouldn't make it to test, and most certainly would not make it out of test. In my early postings on this issue I refused to believe some of the reporting (which now appears to be accurate) because some of it was just too abhorrent. If you knowingly put an airplane in the air with a potentially fatal flaw you are no better than a terrorist, and it doesn't matter how many millions of dollars per plane you saved for the stockholders (who are in a large part the upper management anyway.)
Even after the crashes, Boeing's behavior has been abhorrent -- blaming everybody other than Boeing for the crash. They even (apparently) placed an article in the New York Times that trashed not only the poor pilots, but the owner of the airline, all Asians, the country that the airline operated in, the airport operations, and even the customers for wanting cheap flights. I decided to stop posting for awhile because that article got me too hot under the collar to be coherent, but it is just one example of the unlimited depths to which they are willing to go in order to save the stock price for a day. I probably should stop now...