[conspire] 737 MAX story keeps getting more fractally bad

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> So, ... how do we "fix" it?

Short answer:  Fix the FAA.

The key problem started in 2003, when a Republican-controlled Congress
ordered the FAA to do something catastrophically wrong in response to
complaints about FAA certification delays in post-9/11 actions on lots
of fronts (background checks for tarmac workers, reinforcing cockpit
doors, and much more).  These delay existed mostly because FAA had been
increasingly over the years, underfunded for its duties.  Congress
ordered the wrong remedy:  delegating most airplane certification work
to the manufacturers themselves, and not fixing the funding problem.

  Kurt Krumlauf, one of the FAA officials who shepherded the adoption
  of the self-certification program, said he saw the approach as an
  improvement.  [...]
  Krumlauf estimated the number of inspectors at Boeing jumped from
  about 300 contractors reporting to the FAA to 500 in-house Boeing
  employees.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-the-faa-allows-jetmakers-to-self-certify-that-planes-meet-us-safety-requirements/2019/03/15/96d24d4a-46e6-11e9-90f0-0ccfeec87a61_story.html

Thus, for the last two decades including the critical years after 2011
when the 737 MAX got certified, FAA became a poster child for
'regulatory capture' -- the syndrome of government regulators becoming
subservient to the industries they are supposed to watch over.
Regulatory capture is _all over_ the MAX story.  Consider:  Mark Forkner
used to be an FAA employees, but switched over to working for Boeing as
the chief technical pilot on the MAX project, quite possibly because
Boeing pays a lot better.  In his new job capacity at Boeing, he writes
to his former co-workers at FAA and says 'Hey, is is cool if we just cut
all reference to MCAS from the 737 MAX flight operations manual?  It's
just background software 'n' stuff?  What could possibly go wrong?'  And
his ex-co-workers, perhaps hoping for their own cushy landing at Boeing,
wrote back:  'It's cool.  Whatevs.'

Forkner, as I mentioned, may not have been fully briefed about this, so
it may be unfair to put the blame on him.  Turns out, Boeing made things
radically worse through vastly excessive siloing.  E.g., Boeing decided
that technical pilots like Forkner would work only with simulators, not
actual planes, presumably on a theory of reducing costs and hurrying up
certifications, which appeared to be their overriding goal.  Indeed,
there are signs all over the MAX story of Boeing people not having the
full story because of an absurd amount of compartmentalising of
information.  See:
https://www.radicalcompliance.com/2019/06/02/another-lesson-from-boeing-silos/

Most of the blame lies fairly within Boeing, e.g., the inexcusable
decisions to make safety features only available as high-profit optional
extras, and then not care particularly whether they actually worked,

Worse, the new bunch of money-grubbers in charge starting with
last-but-one CEO McNerney and current CEO Muilenberg, the first ever to
have zero aviation experience, changed company culture so that the firm
ignored engineering basics such as by approving an airframe (the MAX) that
is dynamically unstable, and trying to paper over that damning problem
with poorly engineered software cursed by SPoF-laden inputs -- and then
sleazing that kludge into production _without telling the pilots_.  None
of that made even a tiny bit of sense from an engineering perspective,
only from a money-savings corporate-finance one.

But those were not the actions (or inactions) of public servants.  If
Boeing wants to be the first-ever case of commercial suicide among the
Fortune 50, that's its affair (and, for obvious Montoya-family personal
reasons, I wouldn't miss 'em).  But FAA's actions and inactions are
another matter, and that can and should be fixed by a root-and-branch
do-over that reverses the 2003 error.

Again, the one bit of essential background reading in all of this, IMO,
is the IEE Spectrum article, which please see:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-looks-to-a-software-developer

-- 
Cheers,                                  
Rick (flying Embraer E175s to/from SpikeCon, thanks) Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com
McQ!  (4x80)