Downfall, Netflix documentary
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I suppose $65mil makes it all better if money is all that matters to you.
You’ve seen the movie, now read the book. If Kennedy’s Downfall documentary made you sad at how Boeing fell from pride in excellence to corporate shame, then Peter Robison’s book Flying Blind - the 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing (Penguin Business 2021) will make you angry; very angry.
Robison is an award winning investigative journalist with Bloomberg News. He relates how corporate dysfunction, ruthless cost-cutting and toxic culture contributed to one of aviation's worst tragedies. Although much of his account deals with Boeing’s greed and stock price obsession, he explains technical complexities of airworthiness and MCAS with clarity. The text is leaven with pithy quips and salacious gossip, and I won’t cavil at a few technical errors. No, Comet did not break apart “because designers hadn’t accounted for the way metal expands and contracts with extreme temperature changes”.
This book is a worthy successor to Diane Vaughan’s Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA and before that John Godson’s The Rise and Fall of the DC-10.
Robison is an award winning investigative journalist with Bloomberg News. He relates how corporate dysfunction, ruthless cost-cutting and toxic culture contributed to one of aviation's worst tragedies. Although much of his account deals with Boeing’s greed and stock price obsession, he explains technical complexities of airworthiness and MCAS with clarity. The text is leaven with pithy quips and salacious gossip, and I won’t cavil at a few technical errors. No, Comet did not break apart “because designers hadn’t accounted for the way metal expands and contracts with extreme temperature changes”.
This book is a worthy successor to Diane Vaughan’s Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA and before that John Godson’s The Rise and Fall of the DC-10.
