Comment by jjk166

> Boeing is a company that is expected to do something about 10x more difficult than other companies: they build and sell massively complex machines that have to work safely and reliably 100% of the time

Lots of companies produce complex machines where safety is critical. Arguably making something that won't accidentally kill people is the lowest standard of quality a company is expected to meet. Yes planes are big, and flying is hard, so there are more things that can potentially fail, but it's a matter of scale, it isn't a fundamentally different problem. Boeing knew what it was getting into, and took on the responsibility of allocating sufficient resources to make proper aircraft.

> I think failures like we've seen are nearly inevitable.

Failures in general are inevitable, but the failures we've seen are most certainly not. The particular quality issues in the spotlight are solved problems, and in fact Boeing specifically already solved those problems when they crafted their quality procedures. The were multiple deliberate decisions made to not follow procedures, and these failures are only inevitable as a consequence of those decisions.