DaveReidUK
Thanks for articulating that point, though I wasn't trying to suggest there is much disagreement with regard to the intrinsically fundamental nature of "safety" for an airplane manufacturer.
(That said, we could summarily describe what the company did in the case of the 737 MAX as indeed putting a Band-Aid on a fatally flawed aircraft type variant.)
What I was trying to get at, is the idea that the particular engineering, design, and flight operations details about the flaws in the MAX - which obviously implicate safety of the aircraft - would not be subjects the Directors ordinarily would be expected to be deeply knowledgeable about. These subjects all are delegated to managerial ranks and their staff cadres. To draw on my Board experience, a trustee of a university viewing a presentation about expansion of a degree program wouldn't ask the presenters to justify and explain why specific pages of assigned reading are listed on a course syllabus for the degree program (if the syllabus was even tabled to start with).
So the failure of the Board here to drill down from the level of production plans, revenue projections, customer order statuses and so on, to particular detailed workings of - say - number of AoA sensors for anything being included that might bear resemblance to how stability matters were addressed in the KC-46 tanker -- such failure isn't the same as not having a focus on and oversight of safety.
But it is a failure to direct management. I'm not defending this Board (and while I give Kirkland its due, is this why any of them went to law school?).
A university trustee shouldn't ever have to ask if course syllabus content is being done right. Continuous attention to current matters in Academic Affairs should give enough sense about these occasional concerns. Of course building airplanes is much, much different than teaching college students. And much more difficult......but I hope the Delaware court gets more focused on the specific information flows the company's board failed to elicit. Not just "safety" as a broad overall category.