Netflix Documentary: Downfall

NoCoPilot wrote:

Boeing used to be a great place to work: great benefits, easy promotions, cutting edge work.  My dad spent his whole career there, 32 years, retiring in '79.  My sister worked there for about 3 years right out of college.

However, Boeing lost its Congressional supporters (Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson) in the early '80s, the SST was cancelled in '71, and NASA contracts dried up, the Space Shuttle program (and everything around it) was mothballed (in 2011).  Boeing went through several management changes, to try to stay profitable, leading to several disastrous errors (outsourced parts not fitting, 737-Max instability) and most union contracts being nullified or weakened to the point that most of the talent left.  The company now, from all reports, is a shambling mess.  

They cannot compete with Airbus (the French-English conglomerate which is underwritten by both governments)

In the latter part of the 20st Century Boeing was losing market share to Airbus, and the solution they came up with was to merge with McDonnell Douglas in 1997.  Immediately afterward, Boeing's long-standing culture of "safety first, last, and above all else" was thrown out the window for the new McDonnell Douglas culture of "stock price first, last, and above all else."  When Airbus introduced the totally new, more fuel-efficient A320neo in 2016, during skyrocketing fuel prices, well the financial wizards at M-D (who weren't engineers... unlike at Boeing) panicked.

They decided the best way to get back on top was to retrofit a 40-year old airframe－the 737－with more powerful, more fuel efficient engines, which they called the Max and was rushed into production in 2017. The old plane had millions of trouble-free air miles, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, the new engines were so powerful they tended to cause the plane to climb too fast, and stall.  

So the McDonnell-Douglas engineers came up with MCAS, a software system to detect stalls and gently ease the nose back down without any pilot input.  To save money they made MCAS rely entirely on one sensor, the AOA angle-of-attack sensor on the aircraft exterior.  Previously, no major safety system on any plane relied on a single point of failure.  Especially not one open to the elements, and birds, and mylar balloons.

To avoid having to re-certify the aircraft and retrain all pilots on the MCAS system－a lengthy process－McDonnell-Douglas-Boeing decided to hide its existence.

Well, the AOA sensors failed in October 2018 on Lion Air 610, and again five months later on Ethiopian Airlines 302 March 2019, leading both planes to nosedive into the ground (or ocean) killing all 342 people aboard.

Boeing execs awarded themselves record bonuses between the two crashes.  

Internal documents show they KNEW the MCAS systems had less than 10 seconds to be turned off before the dive became too much to pull out of.  The Lion Air crew did not even know MCAS existed.  Ethiopian Air HAD been briefed on the system, but took slightly more than 10 seconds to diagnose the problem and switch off MCAS, which they did, but by then it was too late.  The plane was headed straight down.

Boeing ended up paying a $2.5B fine to the FAA (big bonuses at the FAA!) with the stipulation that they would never, ever, face any litigation for their poor decision-making.