Comment by camkego
2 years ago
I’ve honestly wondered about this since those two 737 Max crashes.
How on the earth did they design in a non-redundant single point of failure, such as the single angle of attack sensor as in the 737 max? (if this type of component is typically redundant)
But if, “the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing for just five years”. It might explain how such a design decision happened.
Would be really interesting to hear from those the industry, how common a single angle of attack sensor is in other Boeing aircraft and Airbus aircraft?
I also don't understand how you can accept to do this job if there's almost nobody there with enough experience. "Well I have to make ends meet and don't want to look for a new job, so YOLO". What's going through these people's mind today? Especially those who worked on that non-redundant system? They just shrug it off and say "well stupid managers made us do it", or do they feel remorse, responsibility? I genuinely wonder.
Remember people are willing to do just about anything if someone in a position of authority tells them to. New engineers have little "intuition" of what is an isn't appropriate, we rely on the experienced engineers to learn this, along with experience we get along the way, as school mostly teaches us how to learn, not the particulars of whatever job we end up in (speaking mostly of aero's/meche's). You hope you end up in a good place that will train you well but often you are just the newest meat to enter the grinder.
And yes, we often do worry and feel responsibility if something goes wrong or could go wrong. I remember working on a job where I was incredibly out of my depth, where no one in my group had any experience to check what I was doing, which would have had serious implications for peoples lives if my work had an error. I was so stressed I got grey hairs. I know many people who've been in similar positions, or positions of trying to meet impossible deadlines, deal with an unreasonable amount of work that makes doing it correctly unfeesable, or be put in a position where they have to accept practices that they would never put up with later in their careers.
I’m going through something like this, though in a _much_ lower stakes industry. On one side, management always seems to say the right thing to counteract my fears of mediocrity. And then months later a major problem needs fixed in production. I guess I’ll keep going like this until a problem is big enough that it can’t be fixed.
But they treat me well. And my last job was in a different industry that’s known for treating employees badly. So I stay. Again my job is very low stakes but it still eats me up, I can’t imagine how these engineers feel.
I would say "incentives". There was an incentive to do it in a way that needs not be certified, that needs no training and that does not have to be disclosed to airlines/crews. Once that incentive is there management will push it through no matter what, if there isn't a senior enough person to say "this will have dire consequences".