Revelation wrote:

Noshow wrote:

Boeing needs their investors to agree on investing first.
If they only would move ahead now they could beat their competitors. They almost waited for too long. Now they face low deliveries/income and must invest big at the same time. Bring the NMA, bring the NSA but plan with realistic schedules and costs.

To use Harry's terminology, to be successful in commercial aviation you have to find investors who want to own a great engineering firm rather than a great business. I'm not sure this is possible in the current USA. It's strange to see some of the most successful recent companies in the US really were about inventing great things i.e. Amazon, SpaceX, and Tesla. Musk and Bezos had their visions, and they kept enough power to make sure they could keep investing in that vision till it paid off. Yet once the products mature, then the profit taking ensues. Sooner or later industrial investors acquire controlling interests, and it then becomes just like Boeing, money gets invested in keeping the stock price high rather than inventing great things. Industrial investors do not want to own a great engineering firm, they want to own a money making machine.

One FAA safety engineer, who cannot be identified because he spoke without FAA approval, said that in one certification specialty more than 20 such Boeing engineers left in a single month.

“I go to meetings now and don’t know the names,” he wrote in a text. “Brain drain!”

kalvado wrote:

Baby boomers generation was in a sense unprecedented. They came into after two world wars cleaned up the scene, and stayed longer than any other generation. And they didn't do a good job in training replacement as there was little opportunity for professional growth for younger generations. Yes, they may come back as consultants... But they will be irreversibly expiring soon.
I said it before, I am saying it again - Boeing problems are not in C-suit, they are on engineering floors.

Revelation wrote:

kalvado wrote:

It wouldn't surprise me if that isn't how we got the MCAS foobar. Test pilots knew some weird stuff happened, but not my job to make sure engineering knew/understood the concern, that would just take time we don't have to sort out. MCAS given more authority and active at the low speed regime, let's not tell FAA, that package is already signed off.

Wrong again. The Boeing Test pilots did tell the FAA test pilots about the changes to MCAS. It is confirmed in the DOJ report. The FAA test pilots just never told the AEG.

Here, I will post it for a 5th time from the DOJ report

others in Boeing disclosed MCAS’s expanded operational scope to different FAA personnel who were responsible for determining whether the 737 MAX met U.S. federal airworthiness standards

FLYBY72 wrote:

others in Boeing disclosed MCAS’s expanded operational scope to different FAA personnel who were responsible for determining whether the 737 MAX met U.S. federal airworthiness standards

kalvado wrote:

FLYBY72 wrote:

others in Boeing disclosed MCAS’s expanded operational scope to different FAA personnel who were responsible for determining whether the 737 MAX met U.S. federal airworthiness standards

That's part of a bigger problem. Such information should not be spread as word of mouth.
And it is ESPECIALLY bad that it was pilots who relayed the engineering information.

Revelation wrote:

As a tail-end baby boomer, one thing I see in younger engineers is they don't stand up when they get pushed to do half assed work, they say you get what you get and turn in half assed work. They say it's not my job to worry about anything not on my desk, even if I can see how fubar'd other things are. This was not the mentality when I entered the industry. There was a team spirit, and if someone was letting the team down, they heard about it. Now, they say "it is what it is" and go home at 5PM.

djpearman wrote:

Revelation wrote:

As a tail-end baby boomer, one thing I see in younger engineers is they don't stand up when they get pushed to do half assed work, they say you get what you get and turn in half assed work. They say it's not my job to worry about anything not on my desk, even if I can see how fubar'd other things are. This was not the mentality when I entered the industry. There was a team spirit, and if someone was letting the team down, they heard about it. Now, they say "it is what it is" and go home at 5PM.

As a younger engineer, my experience developing aircraft electronics is that the only aspects that (usually older) managers cared about were time and money, never quality. It didn't matter how well the design performed, so long as it cost less than it's sold for and was completed on time. Since I don't like compromising on quality, I was coerced into leaving.

Is it then surprising that the next generation eventually succumbs to that sort of pressure?

BawliBooch wrote:

Opus99 wrote:

Does the US government run anything engineering successfully?

But even the notoriously inefficient US government would be an improvement over the incompetent bunch of buffoons running Boeing right now. This level of incompetence is almost criminal! Their Planes are falling out of the sky and Boeing execs are running around like a bunch of mad bulls in a China shop!

Boeing is a National Institution and the US Government should be doing something to save it!

Revelation wrote:

djpearman wrote:

Revelation wrote:

As a tail-end baby boomer, one thing I see in younger engineers is they don't stand up when they get pushed to do half assed work, they say you get what you get and turn in half assed work. They say it's not my job to worry about anything not on my desk, even if I can see how fubar'd other things are. This was not the mentality when I entered the industry. There was a team spirit, and if someone was letting the team down, they heard about it. Now, they say "it is what it is" and go home at 5PM.

As a younger engineer, my experience developing aircraft electronics is that the only aspects that (usually older) managers cared about were time and money, never quality. It didn't matter how well the design performed, so long as it cost less than it's sold for and was completed on time. Since I don't like compromising on quality, I was coerced into leaving.

Is it then surprising that the next generation eventually succumbs to that sort of pressure?

That's really unfortunate. I know for a fact that my immediate supervisors took a lot of heat for those of us in the trenches. They realized that if we were totally stressed out we'd get nothing done. Sadly that seems to be lost in many environments, they just pass on the heat, and if anything, multiply it. Hopefully you've found a better environment to work in.

Revelation wrote:

kalvado wrote:

FLYBY72 wrote:

[b]

That's part of a bigger problem. Such information should not be spread as word of mouth.
And it is ESPECIALLY bad that it was pilots who relayed the engineering information.

Yes, that's the point I was trying to make, but did so poorly. A lot of the communication was done informally which left the opportunity for it to be misunderstood, forgotten or ignored.

Q So whose job would it have been, if there were going to be a change in MCAS, to inform the chief technical pilot or the other technical pilots about the change that was being made?

A The team would have to create a coordination sheet defining the changes that were being done and share it throughout the team. I'm assuming it went through the pilot organization, and the pilot organization would ensure that it got to the appropriate people.

Q So --

A I don't know exactly how that process works. I'm not --

Q But is it your expectation that a change like the change that was done to MCAS would have been information that would have been shared with the technical pilots? It wouldn't have been held secret from them, would it?

A It wouldn't. It would not have been held from them, no.

Q Okay.

A It should have been shared.

Q Do you know whose job it would be at Boeing to inform the FAA about a change like that to MCAS?

A Certainly. As part of the team that came forth with the change and the recommendation, they brought forth to me a communication plan to the FAA where we would go and share with the FAA technical specialists the changes that we're doing. As well as, I certainly know that pilots at the FAA would get involved, because the pilots would end up having to fly the enhanced -- or not enhanced. That's the wrong word -- expanded MCAS functionality. They would have to fly it for certification purposes. So the pilots would know and the technical experts would know and the certification plans would have to be updated and ultimately the certification deliverable. So the engineering team would do that.

Pythagoras wrote:

What I would note here it that the focus of the communication is on the certification deliverables. As far as I can know, the coordination sheet which communicated the change to MCAS functionality which occurred during flight test in March 2016 has not been released into the public record. The distribution list on the coordination sheet would answer a lot of questions.

If there’s a runaway stabilizer, Sinnett asked them, why does the reason matter? Can’t a pilot in such a situation just run the checklist? The American Airlines flyers knew instinctively that a malfunction like the one on the Lion Air jet would take time to diagnose. “This particular one is masked by so many other distractions,” union spokesman Dennis Tajer answered. “Exactly,” Michaelis agreed.

The plane was still new to the pilots, and few had flown it much or done little more than cursory training on an iPad. Michaelis fumed that, from the accounts he’d read, the software had kept whacking the nose of the plane down: “You’re touching my stick, you know?” Boeing “would’ve had a real shitstorm,” he continued, if the same failure had happened on a Max flight out of Miami and American had dropped a plane into Biscayne Bay. “Somebody at the corporate level made the decision that this isn’t important to brief our pilots on,” he said.

The pilots kept raising scenarios for Sinnett, and they ended up almost talking among themselves. One pilot wondered why he got only 40 minutes of training on the Max when the display was so different from its predecessor’s. Another pointed out that American still didn’t have a Max simulator.

Sinnett finally summoned words to match their intensity. “You’ve got to understand that our commitment to safety is as great as yours,” he said. “It really is. And the worst thing that can ever happen is a tragedy like this. And the even worse thing would be another one. So we have to do all the things we can to make sure that this never happens again.” He said Boeing was working hard on an MCAS update to tame the system. “Not a year, but a couple—maybe six weeks-ish,” he said.

Revelation wrote:

Overall the piece talks about a kind of "omerta", or code of silence, amongst Boeing engineers about safety issues. Allegedly, bad consequences befell engineers who wrote in email that the infamous 737 rudder failover situation was a problem for the company, so they as a tribe responded by saying as little as possible about safety issues, especially in written form.

Revelation wrote:

Long extract from a new book coming out on the MCAS topic:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... -737-crash

Titled: Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, by Peter Robison, to be published on Nov. 30 by Doubleday.

One interesting quote, from the meeting with Boeing VP Mike Sinnett and AA's pilot union officials, after the JT crash but before the ET one:

If there’s a runaway stabilizer, Sinnett asked them, why does the reason matter? Can’t a pilot in such a situation just run the checklist? The American Airlines flyers knew instinctively that a malfunction like the one on the Lion Air jet would take time to diagnose. “This particular one is masked by so many other distractions,” union spokesman Dennis Tajer answered. “Exactly,” Michaelis agreed.

The plane was still new to the pilots, and few had flown it much or done little more than cursory training on an iPad. Michaelis fumed that, from the accounts he’d read, the software had kept whacking the nose of the plane down: “You’re touching my stick, you know?” Boeing “would’ve had a real shitstorm,” he continued, if the same failure had happened on a Max flight out of Miami and American had dropped a plane into Biscayne Bay. “Somebody at the corporate level made the decision that this isn’t important to brief our pilots on,” he said.

The pilots kept raising scenarios for Sinnett, and they ended up almost talking among themselves. One pilot wondered why he got only 40 minutes of training on the Max when the display was so different from its predecessor’s. Another pointed out that American still didn’t have a Max simulator.

Sinnett finally summoned words to match their intensity. “You’ve got to understand that our commitment to safety is as great as yours,” he said. “It really is. And the worst thing that can ever happen is a tragedy like this. And the even worse thing would be another one. So we have to do all the things we can to make sure that this never happens again.” He said Boeing was working hard on an MCAS update to tame the system. “Not a year, but a couple—maybe six weeks-ish,” he said.

This was the conversation that was taped "discretely" by the AA union guy. I don't know if the transcript has already been released, but it's very interesting to me. The AA pilots responded instantly about how/why relying on the four second rule was a total non-starter. It seems so dubious the way Boeing talked themselves into just going with it! The Boeing VP says they are working on a fix to be released in six weeks. Didn't anyone within Boeing do a serious analysis on the risk of not getting that fix out before another crash? Apparently FAA did, but allegedly its math was done incorrectly and unfortunatly, too optimistically.

Overall the piece talks about a kind of "omerta", or code of silence, amongst Boeing engineers about safety issues. Allegedly, bad consequences befell engineers who wrote in email that the infamous 737 rudder failover situation was a problem for the company, so they as a tribe responded by saying as little as possible about safety issues, especially in written form.

Early that December, staffers in the FAA’s Aircraft Certification Service concluded there might be 15 more Max crashes without a software fix, based on a rough estimate that one in every hundred pilots might have trouble handling the rare sensor failure.

CanukinUSA wrote:

The Lion Air Official Aircraft Accident report has been released and is available on the Indonesian Aircraft Accident Investigiation site.
The Ethiopean Accident report has not been released and is a preliminary version only. When the official report will be released is not currently known given the civil war that is going on in Ethiopia right now. Your guess is as good as mine. It was remoured to be released a few months ago but that has not happened.

CanukinUSA wrote:

It appears that the Presentation "Flying Blind:The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing" may be livestreamed in about 20 minutes on youtube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JB65CUaQ-M

Dalavia wrote:

It was live streamed. I watched it from start to finish. Nothing really new but very interesting nonetheless, with some perceptive insights especially into Boeing’s culture shift (for the worse) over recent decades. It was, of course, designed to promote the launch of the book.

Boeing had been a giant of American aviation for a century, but a financial reinvention under Muilenburg turned it into something else—a Wall Street darling. In 2017 it had reported a 67% jump in earnings, to $8.2 billion. Boeing’s share price had almost tripled during Muilenburg’s short tenure, reaching more than $386, and his chief financial officer, Greg Smith, told colleagues in one meeting that it could top $800 or $900 if the company kept doing what had made shareholders happy: raising the dividend, buying back shares, and keeping expenses low.

That’s precisely what some people at Boeing feared, according to hundreds of hours of interviews with current and former employees for the book from which this article is adapted, Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing. Among themselves, they complained about how a company that had once been ruled by engineers who thumbed their noses at Wall Street now celebrated managers for cost-cutting, co-opted regulators, and pressured suppliers with relentless, Walmart-style tactics to cut their prices.

Revelation wrote:

Dalavia wrote:

It was live streamed. I watched it from start to finish. Nothing really new but very interesting nonetheless, with some perceptive insights especially into Boeing’s culture shift (for the worse) over recent decades. It was, of course, designed to promote the launch of the book.

Just reading the excerpt from Bloomberg (see my earlier post) gave me the same impression.

Here's the part I mean:

Boeing had been a giant of American aviation for a century, but a financial reinvention under Muilenburg turned it into something else—a Wall Street darling. In 2017 it had reported a 67% jump in earnings, to $8.2 billion. Boeing’s share price had almost tripled during Muilenburg’s short tenure, reaching more than $386, and his chief financial officer, Greg Smith, told colleagues in one meeting that it could top $800 or $900 if the company kept doing what had made shareholders happy: raising the dividend, buying back shares, and keeping expenses low.

That’s precisely what some people at Boeing feared, according to hundreds of hours of interviews with current and former employees for the book from which this article is adapted, Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing. Among themselves, they complained about how a company that had once been ruled by engineers who thumbed their noses at Wall Street now celebrated managers for cost-cutting, co-opted regulators, and pressured suppliers with relentless, Walmart-style tactics to cut their prices.

I get it, there are some companies that are overly indulgent on the tech side and others that are overly focused on the bottom line, and some that manage to strike a balance between rewarding shareholders and investing in the company's future. Boeing has had this run where they are overly focused on rewarding shareholders, and of course, executives, since they pay themselves in shares. It's hard to see them making the changes they need to make under Calhoun. There's very little evidence that he'll do anything but continue the practices he helped shape as a board member during the Muilenburg era.

Pythagoras wrote:

[...]

This answers the question of who was responsible for the analysis which permitted the 737Max to continue to fly after the Lion Air accident. I'm surprised by the 1-in-100 pilot number used in the risk analysis. It doesn't sound like a number where anyone put any thought into it. It seems like a number that someone used to arrive at a predetermined answer. I would have guessed 1-in-10 would have been used because Safety Engineers are usually very conservative with this type of analysis.

IADFCO wrote:

I'd bet anything that this simple due diligence would have shown massive red flags on the 4-second assumption. Not predicted what would have happened, mind you, the model is too crude (although I'm sure that Boeing has the required human factors expertise in-house), but raising massive red flags, yes.

Pythagoras wrote:

From the Bloomberg article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-16/are-boeing-planes-unsafe-pilots-blamed-for-corporate-errors-in-max-737-crash

Early that December, staffers in the FAA’s Aircraft Certification Service concluded there might be 15 more Max crashes without a software fix, based on a rough estimate that one in every hundred pilots might have trouble handling the rare sensor failure.

This answers the question of who was responsible for the analysis which permitted the 737Max to continue to fly after the Lion Air accident. I'm surprised by the 1-in-100 pilot number used in the risk analysis. It doesn't sound like a number where anyone put any thought into it. It seems like a number that someone used to arrive at a predetermined answer. I would have guessed 1-in-10 would have been used because Safety Engineers are usually very conservative with this type of analysis.

eeightning wrote:

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/29/1059784424/flying-blind-author-says-boeing-put-profit-ahead-of-safety-with-the-737-max

The Author is Bloomberg Biz week reporter Peter Robison, and the book "Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy And The Fall Of Boeing."

Nothing new, but he does a nice job explaining how Boeing morphed from an Engineering drivin' company who rarely made such terrible engineering decisions (and when they did they accepted responsibility) to a financial engineering company that excelled at engineering shortcuts above all, and also tricking regulators into letting them get away with it, and finally shifting blame onto pilots, and token scapegoats.

It is an excellent interview and there is much more in it. Listen yourself, or read the book and share your observations.

trex8 wrote:

Im about a 1/3 way through the book, this is a must read for anutters. How Boeing (and Im sure many other companies) got totally messed up by the Welch GE view of providing shareholder value and not concentrating on their products will be something they teach in biz schools in the future, along with the mea culpas from the biz school profs who already are saying they got it wrong.

CanukinUSA wrote:

It appears that some member of the US Congress are asking for more details on the Boeing 737 Max oversight by the FAA. We will see if this amounts to anything or not.
For details go to
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerosp ... 021-11-29/

FLYBY72 wrote:

CanukinUSA wrote:

It appears that some member of the US Congress are asking for more details on the Boeing 737 Max oversight by the FAA. We will see if this amounts to anything or not.
For details go to
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerosp ... 021-11-29/

They will continue to stall like they have been doing. They sure don't want congress knowing the truth.

frmrCapCadet wrote:

An armchair ceo comment. Had Boeing only half way screwed up the 787 mess, and only half of the MAX fubar, and let's say the 777X would have faced tighter regulatory certification because Boeing, congress, and the agencies agreed the prior balance was wrong. Manufacturing and deliveries would never have been stopped more more than weeks as opposed to months and years. There would easily have been enough money to build the MOM, which most on line here thought would be a great success with airlines, and possibly not much of a profit maker. Boeing would be sitting on top of the heap, or at least close. Had any of the frequent posters been on the board and stuck with this plan, psycho CEOs would have got rid of them and stuck with their plans for personal enrichment. After all, it did work for all of them.

trex8 wrote:

eeightning wrote:

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/29/1059784424/flying-blind-author-says-boeing-put-profit-ahead-of-safety-with-the-737-max

The Author is Bloomberg Biz week reporter Peter Robison, and the book "Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy And The Fall Of Boeing."

Nothing new, but he does a nice job explaining how Boeing morphed from an Engineering drivin' company who rarely made such terrible engineering decisions (and when they did they accepted responsibility) to a financial engineering company that excelled at engineering shortcuts above all, and also tricking regulators into letting them get away with it, and finally shifting blame onto pilots, and token scapegoats.

It is an excellent interview and there is much more in it. Listen yourself, or read the book and share your observations.

Im about a 1/3 way through the book, this is a must read for anutters. How Boeing (and Im sure many other companies) got totally messed up by the Welch GE view of providing shareholder value and not concentrating on their products will be something they teach in biz schools in the future, along with the mea culpas from the biz school profs who already are saying they got it wrong.

Revelation wrote:

FLYBY72 wrote:

CanukinUSA wrote:

It appears that some member of the US Congress are asking for more details on the Boeing 737 Max oversight by the FAA. We will see if this amounts to anything or not.
For details go to
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerosp ... 021-11-29/

They will continue to stall like they have been doing. They sure don't want congress knowing the truth.

Then Congress can stall on the next set of payments for KC-46, F-15 EX, etc.

FLYBY72 wrote:

Revelation wrote:

FLYBY72 wrote:

They will continue to stall like they have been doing. They sure don't want congress knowing the truth.

Then Congress can stall on the next set of payments for KC-46, F-15 EX, etc.

What does the FAA stalling Congress have to do with the KC-46, F-15EX?

DenverTed wrote:

If the design team built the landing gear leg to take half the load and it failed, would they blame the FAA for not catching it?
MCAS having more speed, multiple firings, and based on one sensor should have been caught by Boeing, if they had professional pride in their design. I think they should have asked the question, what if an AOA sensor fails, which many will over the fleet in 20 years. They could have tested that with an unknowing airline crew on a test flight with some Boeing test pilots to save them. Instead, the defacto plan was to test that in the real world with a passenger flight, and then after a crash, try it again?
At some point, whoever makes a complex design, owns it at least 90%. If there is a structural engineer for a tall building in the city of Chicago or New York, the building department isn't going to catch everything. Unless the FAA puts the same amount of hours into checking Boeing's work as Boeing uses in design, which is unrealistic.
It's like using a table saw, somebody could be standing there watching you for safety, but the bottom line is you have to focus enough to decrease the risk of mistake is the core tenet.

FLYBY72 wrote:

DenverTed wrote:

If the design team built the landing gear leg to take half the load and it failed, would they blame the FAA for not catching it?
MCAS having more speed, multiple firings, and based on one sensor should have been caught by Boeing, if they had professional pride in their design. I think they should have asked the question, what if an AOA sensor fails, which many will over the fleet in 20 years. They could have tested that with an unknowing airline crew on a test flight with some Boeing test pilots to save them. Instead, the defacto plan was to test that in the real world with a passenger flight, and then after a crash, try it again?
At some point, whoever makes a complex design, owns it at least 90%. If there is a structural engineer for a tall building in the city of Chicago or New York, the building department isn't going to catch everything. Unless the FAA puts the same amount of hours into checking Boeing's work as Boeing uses in design, which is unrealistic.
It's like using a table saw, somebody could be standing there watching you for safety, but the bottom line is you have to focus enough to decrease the risk of mistake is the core tenet.

Boring did catch all of that. They also told the FAA all of that. Guess what? It met standards. MCAS is a sub mode mode of the Speed Trim System. Malfunctions of the STS were rated hazardous by THE FAA!! So sub mode rated hazardous only requires 1 sensor. The FAA knows this. They know because they, not Boeing, certified it. That is why they are stalling Congress. Boeing handed over everything. The FAA has not. The FAA is also not letting certain people talk to Congress. Why is that?

DenverTed wrote:

FLYBY72 wrote:

DenverTed wrote:

If the design team built the landing gear leg to take half the load and it failed, would they blame the FAA for not catching it?
MCAS having more speed, multiple firings, and based on one sensor should have been caught by Boeing, if they had professional pride in their design. I think they should have asked the question, what if an AOA sensor fails, which many will over the fleet in 20 years. They could have tested that with an unknowing airline crew on a test flight with some Boeing test pilots to save them. Instead, the defacto plan was to test that in the real world with a passenger flight, and then after a crash, try it again?
At some point, whoever makes a complex design, owns it at least 90%. If there is a structural engineer for a tall building in the city of Chicago or New York, the building department isn't going to catch everything. Unless the FAA puts the same amount of hours into checking Boeing's work as Boeing uses in design, which is unrealistic.
It's like using a table saw, somebody could be standing there watching you for safety, but the bottom line is you have to focus enough to decrease the risk of mistake is the core tenet.

Boring did catch all of that. They also told the FAA all of that. Guess what? It met standards. MCAS is a sub mode mode of the Speed Trim System. Malfunctions of the STS were rated hazardous by THE FAA!! So sub mode rated hazardous only requires 1 sensor. The FAA knows this. They know because they, not Boeing, certified it. That is why they are stalling Congress. Boeing handed over everything. The FAA has not. The FAA is also not letting certain people talk to Congress. Why is that?

So if the speed trim is based on one AOA, there must have been ten to fifty failures over the years that the crews had to deal with. I wonder what the history of that looks like. Obviously MCAS must have been a more severe event of a speed trim failure.
My point was that a builder has 75% responsibility for building something that works, and the safety checking mechanism of the building dept. or FAA is only 25%. I don't think a structural engineer for a high rise can just design faulty product, and then when it fails, wash their hands and say the building dept. is 100% responsible for safety and catching all mistakes.

Pythagoras wrote:

But the change appears to have been inadvertently hidden from the FAA human factors regulators and hidden from the technical pilots who would have been the ones to challenge the hazardous classification.

Revelation wrote:

Pythagoras wrote:

But the change appears to have been inadvertently hidden from the FAA human factors regulators and hidden from the technical pilots who would have been the ones to challenge the hazardous classification.

Or maybe it was not inadvertent, but we'll never know because Boeing has managed to keep the key decision makers in that loop under wraps, and Congress never followed the paper trail from 737 Chief Engineer Teal (who says he only heard about multiple activation via the media and just trusted his underlings on the flight control team without any due diligence) down to whomever made the key decisions.

kalvado wrote:

Revelation wrote:

Pythagoras wrote:

But the change appears to have been inadvertently hidden from the FAA human factors regulators and hidden from the technical pilots who would have been the ones to challenge the hazardous classification.

Or maybe it was not inadvertent, but we'll never know because Boeing has managed to keep the key decision makers in that loop under wraps, and Congress never followed the paper trail from 737 Chief Engineer Teal (who says he only heard about multiple activation via the media and just trusted his underlings on the flight control team without any due diligence) down to whomever made the key decisions.

And what would that change, after all? It is possibly possible to put someone (two, ten ones) behind the bars.
Would it resurrect those who died? Would it help MAX to be a better plane? Would it make future planes safer?
Any follow up is only as good as it would make for some better future. Putting blame on someone personally would hardly change problematic workflows, and not necessarily make people more willing to share concerns.
So maybe there is a better option than pinpointing guilty?