Six months and billions in losses after two of its 737 MAX airliners suffered deadly crashes, Boeing is still working on a fix for the troubled aircraft model. What’s clear by now is that the problem isn’t just, as originally suspected, a faulty sensor. Like a homeowner whose attempt to repair a soft spot in the molding reveals a rotten joist and then a whole rotten wall, the facts behind 737 MAX fiasco reveal a corporate culture that has been quietly deteriorating for decades. While the proximate cause of the accident was a piece of hardware you can fit in your hand, solving the problem might require tearing the company down to its foundation.
Thanks to reporting by many superb journalists, the genesis of the tragedy is now understood in detail. The tale begins in the 2000s, when Boeing decided against investing in a clean-sheet replacement for its hugely popular but aging 737 narrow-body jet. It continued in the 2010s, when the company decided to make massive payouts to investors through dividends and stock buybacks rather than invest in engineers or technology. And it reached its culmination with the decision to hastily update the 737 by slapping together a Frankenplane whose powerful new engines caused it to be dynamically unstable. To paper over the plane’s flaws, Boeing fitted it with an ill-conceived automated system that would spring into action at unexpected times, and farmed out the software that ran it to coders in India. Worst of all, it didn’t even tell pilots that the system existed.
To be sure, the 737 MAX that started to roll off the production line in Renton, Washington in February 2018 was mostly fine. It was sleek, efficient, and solidly constructed. And it worked as intended almost all the time. But in modern aviation, 99.99% reliable is not reliable enough. Tens of thousands of planes take off every day, and in order to preserve public confidence, all of them have to land in one piece. A plane that crashes once every hundred thousand times isn’t good enough. And there’s no reason today for anyone to build a plane that is less than perfect.
Read the rest of the story on Medium, where it originally appeared on September 23, 2019.