Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief (opens in new tab)

In a way is this not an appropriate response for multiple breaches? If I was CSO and my company was plagued by breaches that came about because of my lack of oversight when it was my job I’d fully expect to be fired.

I don’t believe a single incident is equivalent in this case to what happened to the MAX platform, to much has gone wrong

No it is not.

Breaches can happen for many reasons, from we do not give a fuck to everyone knows and have accepted the situation.

The job of the CSO is to bring things on the table even when they are not nice to hear, provide a solution and recommend priorities.

When well documented it is a good bottom protector.

Quality Assurance, especially when subservient to a CTO or Engineering head is often this as well.

CISO: Cyber Incident Sacrificial Offering

I don't think the rank-and-file are out of the woods yet. As far as this specific departure, he was a VP of the 737MAX program and for 2.x years at that. I presume there are equivalents for the rest of the 737 line and then for the 777, 787, etc. This does not even touch the rest of Boeing. Yes, he's a large fish but I don't see him as one of the truly big fishes. FWIW, I am not for or against this guy, I have no idea if he's part of the solution or prolonging the problem.

But it doesn't start at the top, it starts at the middle.

I think it is important to note the Federation previously wasn’t in the business of building warships. They are so technically advanced, they didn’t need them.

As a friend of mine put it:

Everyone’s best warships are in a dead heat with a luxury liner full of nerds that happens to have guns on it.

Starfleet ships didn’t need armor. Their materials science was already so advanced, they had to use structural integrity and dampening fields to push beyond what existing physical materials could accomplish.

So when they roll out an actual warship using physical armor plating, it is an incredible advancement in materials beyond “simple” energy-reinforced hulls.

Alternatively, it’s really boring technology but the idea of a Starfleet warship is so new they are salivating over things everyone else has been using for centuries. It’s like giving a tank to a soccer mom and telling her to have fun in traffic.

Instead of expending energy to deflect energy weapons fire, the ablative armor undergoes controlled ablation so the outer layers of the armor vaporize or erode when struck by weapon fire, taking the brunt of the attack's energy. This meant that the "total energy" available to defend the ship wasn't limited by the ship's power but by the starbase assembling the ship and the armor could survive a lot more malfunction and battle damage (the shields became completely useless once they burned out). Until the introduction of the armor everyone thought that physical defenses couldn't be used effectively against energy weapons.

Voyager's ablative generator also provided regenerative capability so it didn't need a space dock to repair heavy damage.

Sometimes (as rare as you expect, likely) an MBA has the tooling to fight back against the standard business pressures to cut costs, whereas an engineer is basically defenseless.

Quite rare.

> There can be bad apples in engineering,

So true ... Jack Welch was an engineer.

Any of the two intertwined organizations will eject bad apples towards the other?

Yes but Boeing needs to send a message. A message that they understood how they failed, a message that they apologize, a message that they can be redeemed.

Sometimes, it’s about PR.

And culture, they haven’t changed. Boeing is still firing engineers, appointing MBAs, getting paid by politicians, and hiring on the revolving doors of local prisons. I wouldn’t even trust a burger flipped by this bunch. Boeing factories also need to move to other states before we trust them again.

This is the completely and utterly insufferable mindset that one gets when they spend too much time around other engineers and actually begins to buy into the completely fabricated self-important narrative that they are God’s gift to the world. It s a profession! Pull your head in. I’m not sure what sort of highschool bully trauma you’re trying to make up for, but being a bully yourself isn’t the answer. Interest rate rises couldn’t come soon enough, because there’s obviously at least one generation of techies that have been tricked into thinking that ‘finance’ starts and ends with “take a bunch of dumb VC money, build a completely unsustainable business, and change jobs every 18 months”.

I’m not for one second saying that Boeing hasn’t been seriously mismanaged. The whole debacle has just inexplicably been some sort of lightning rod for people that want to flex their self-identified nerd cred by saying “ENGINEER GOOD BUSINESS BAD!”

From personal experience, once engineers go the MBA route they tend to lose their technical edge and get sucked into the vortex of the MBA universe. It's like some strange indoctrination process.

Absolutely, but systemically, that's not been their problem. Too many MBAs are making decisions without Engineering involvement. I know because my industry works the exact same way le rage

And good engineers that become bad managers

I know that there was a Boeing sub with a doc repository whose internal address was "TheBlameThrower". It had the explicit purpose of nailing specific people for saying specific things. So throwing people under transmissions is something of a company sport, with points awarded for distance and style.

Mmmmm, there was a delicious "Under-Bus-Throw Contest" in the wake of the MCAS fiasco, centered around their chief technical test pilot, Mark Forkner.

Keep in mind that half of this is anecdotal, but the sequence of events was something like this. Crap goes down, Forkner gets canned. He leaks documents, and wow, that was super bad. Now something curious happens, more docs get leaked - from <s>who knows where</s> - showing that Forkner was a bit of a burnt out cynical a-hole[1]. Now, imagine those chats going to the media - it would make that person seem like the real villain, yes? The DOJ thought so too, so the leak brought criminal fraud charges on Forkner. After that, even worse documents were leaked - probably from Forkner or his attorney's people - and the charges get walked back, because it's insanely obvious that whatever fraud he might have been committing was done at the behest of his masters. A colossal cock up, part of the bigger cock up that was the PR blitz following the MCAS crashes, which was itself a subset of the Ubersturmbanfuhrer Cockup of the MCAS fiasco. It's cockups all the way up.

In this tit for tat, the only one with the bomb craters showing was Boeing's rep, because, let's be honest here, at the end of the day even if Forkner was a horrible asshole he was still Boeing's representative to the goddamn flying world.

Terribly calculated, terribly executed, terrible results. A masterclass in how not to do public relations and, failing that, dirty tricks campaigns.

[1] You know the type. The guy who always ends each IM with some quip about what crap your company is making and how he feels like a con artist. His soul, hollow and shrivelled from all the sucking sounds, tends to kick cats and hiss at dogs. Leak that to the media, see who the villain is now.

I see a lot of comments trying to pin point the problem with a name. People: if in an airplane some pieces are taken off, they have to be labeled. In fact anything entering or leaving the airplane has to be noted, juat like in an op-room, to avoid for example forgetting tools (or loose bolts) somewhere. That is basic ABC 101 of working in an airplane.

Why this happened? Massive cost cuts ordered by management, which led to cut corners, or cut trainings, or both. If ing. Or MBA is irrelevant. If I have to guess, I would point to an MBA

This was actually a QA problem — a set of design issues starting at the front of the process. All QC can do is identify problems after they have occurred.

As the saying goes, “you can’t test quality into a product.”

The person you're replying to was being sarcastic. But -- to be clear -- this was clearly a problem with the defect tracking process, not like individual QC contributors.

Isn't it wondrous what lobbying can do?

It's pretty common. Company A is doing well, company B is much smaller than company A, A acquires B, A's executives get wonderful retirement parachutes and promote B's executives. Thus A gets to be run by B as if B had acquired A rather than the inverse.

It is really hard. China, Russia and Japan have tried state sponsored schemes without success. Bombardier of Canada had to throw in the towel, and Embraer of Brazil almost did.

Part of the problem is also that airlines have been very good at squeezing the duopoly while demanding ever more. The competition, if it manages to get a plane in the air, usually isn’t as fuel efficient and so the airlines have mostly not been interested.

I'm sure SpaceX could build a jet if they wanted to.

I'm also certain they don't want to.

Embraer seems to have the highest standards, or very close to highest, in the industry now. But I think it's unlikely that they'll be capable and willing to compete with Boeing or Airbus in the near future.

They also have a space business which is losing staggering amounts of money due to incompetence.

You could argue, they do better the more people they kill.

Their government programs have hit some snags recently too. The KC-46 and Starliner programs have not exactly been smooth money-makers for them.

Oh, individuals absolutely matter.

Just not this one specific individual.

Yeah firing someone who was on the engineering side is not a good look when the problems are on the MBA side.

Based on the fact that we are experiencing a competence crisis right now, particularly in aviation but also more generally. Someone with that many years of technical experience should probably just be mentoring 100% of the time.