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Flying Blind is a story about 347 murders. 346 of those were human beings, smashed to pieces as the out of control jetliner they were flying in impacted the ground at incredible speed. Those murders only happened because the Boeing company had first been killed, its once world-class engineering culture hollowed out by glossy-eyed executives worshipping the Cult of Shareholder Value. This book is the gripping true crime thriller of how that happened.
The proximate causes of the two crashes, the Indonesian Lion Air and Ethiopia Air Lines, is a simple and stupid engineering failure. A piece of software in the new 737 MAX, deemed MCAS, took control of the airplane from the pilots on the basis of a single malfunctioning angle-of-attack sensor and flew the airplanes into the ground.
But MCAS only existed because of a series of horrendous decisions made by Boeing executives. The 737 MAX is an update of a 60 year old airplane, and MCAS compensates for aerodynamic changes caused by bigger and more efficient engines which are positioned in front of, rather than below the wing, allowing Boeing to argue to the FAA and airlines that the MAX was essentially the same airplane as the prior 737-800, and could enter into service without significant pilot training.
No responsible engineer or regulator would have approved the design, an obvious single point of failure, but there were no such people left. Building airplanes is a hard, complex business. Boeing had traditionally been focused on engineering first, with robustly tested designs evaluated in a tight loop between various flight groups, test pilots, and training. But the 737 MAX was developed after decades of cost-cutting by GE and McDonnell-Douglas heritage executives.
Reporting lines went right to management, who didn't want to hear bad news, anything that would jeopardize schedules, and who didn't understand aviation and didn't care to. Internal warnings that the MAX was flawed went unheeded. FAA regulators, who were supposed to approve the plane, were actually reporting to Boeing rather than their own chain of command, with performance incentives to approve the MAX and no power to stop it going into service.
The lessons of this book are twofold. First, the red tape of regulations are written in blood. Second, corporate American management in the style of GE's Jack Welch is mere pillaging of productive assets. In the years prior to the 737 MAX, Boeing made over $25 billion in stock buybacks, enough to easily fund R&D on a true next-generation single aisle jetliner. The shortcuts made in developing the MAX (and I've barely scratched the surface) were ultimately far more costly than doing it right.
If you fly, you've likely been on a 737 and will likely be on a MAX at some point. But more to the point, what happened to Boeing is what's happened to America, where a bunch of sociopaths in suits are willing to cause a little bit of harm to millions of people to make themselves a dollar. Utopian me says that we need a way to effectively punish management which is incompetent to the point of murder. Pragmatic me will settle for a ban on stock buybacks, which are clearly market manipulation and allowed only by a quirk of Reagan-era deregulation which can be reversed.
The proximate causes of the two crashes, the Indonesian Lion Air and Ethiopia Air Lines, is a simple and stupid engineering failure. A piece of software in the new 737 MAX, deemed MCAS, took control of the airplane from the pilots on the basis of a single malfunctioning angle-of-attack sensor and flew the airplanes into the ground.
But MCAS only existed because of a series of horrendous decisions made by Boeing executives. The 737 MAX is an update of a 60 year old airplane, and MCAS compensates for aerodynamic changes caused by bigger and more efficient engines which are positioned in front of, rather than below the wing, allowing Boeing to argue to the FAA and airlines that the MAX was essentially the same airplane as the prior 737-800, and could enter into service without significant pilot training.
No responsible engineer or regulator would have approved the design, an obvious single point of failure, but there were no such people left. Building airplanes is a hard, complex business. Boeing had traditionally been focused on engineering first, with robustly tested designs evaluated in a tight loop between various flight groups, test pilots, and training. But the 737 MAX was developed after decades of cost-cutting by GE and McDonnell-Douglas heritage executives.
Reporting lines went right to management, who didn't want to hear bad news, anything that would jeopardize schedules, and who didn't understand aviation and didn't care to. Internal warnings that the MAX was flawed went unheeded. FAA regulators, who were supposed to approve the plane, were actually reporting to Boeing rather than their own chain of command, with performance incentives to approve the MAX and no power to stop it going into service.
The lessons of this book are twofold. First, the red tape of regulations are written in blood. Second, corporate American management in the style of GE's Jack Welch is mere pillaging of productive assets. In the years prior to the 737 MAX, Boeing made over $25 billion in stock buybacks, enough to easily fund R&D on a true next-generation single aisle jetliner. The shortcuts made in developing the MAX (and I've barely scratched the surface) were ultimately far more costly than doing it right.
If you fly, you've likely been on a 737 and will likely be on a MAX at some point. But more to the point, what happened to Boeing is what's happened to America, where a bunch of sociopaths in suits are willing to cause a little bit of harm to millions of people to make themselves a dollar. Utopian me says that we need a way to effectively punish management which is incompetent to the point of murder. Pragmatic me will settle for a ban on stock buybacks, which are clearly market manipulation and allowed only by a quirk of Reagan-era deregulation which can be reversed.