Originally Posted by
Blackfriar
Let's add TDS to your TLAs.
The 737 (all variants) are not bad aircraft. The conspiracy to cover up the differences between old and MAX was criminal. The design of MAX MCAS with only two inputs to a safety critical system, instead of "best-of-three" was yet another appalling cost-saving decision that cost lives.
Three Letter Acronyms seem to come naturally to The Boeing Company. If that led to more insightful FCOMS that would be worth the extra letter or two.
The failure to disclose the novel system came about from one messed up process, which the FAA had many heads up over a very long time. In the end, a single fall guy gets dragged into court for sending poor prose that came back to bite him. The one guy that sat in front of a judge was not the cause, he was a result of the companies systemic issues and happened to be the guy who actually found an issue by accident, and then messed up. He didn't design it, and, reading his emails, I'm not 100% certain that what he saw was actually what the plane eventually encountered. The process that the engineers followed was flawed, but they did not develop the system that pressed them to come up with such solutions, and then they failed to evaluate the system architecture they had arrived at for failure modes. That, the engineers failed in, and that is what occurs in design fro time to time. They didn't act criminally, they did act with less than stellar competence. The system is owned by the Companies senior managers, they oversaw the behaviour towards production QA being marginalised, as did the FAA, and they oversaw the ethics of the company, which is a sorry tale of it's own.
The Dept of Justice moved with unseemly haste to marginalise the victims and to give cover to the Company, and that is unconscionable A penalty that values the lives lost at around 25% of what the govt wanted for the embarrassment of the Companies failings on the watch of the govt is poor taste.