Comment by jcgrillo

That is a massive over-simplification and that invites patently false characterizations like it was a "stupid mistake" that would have been fixed if they were not stupid (i.e. adopted average development process). That is absolutely not the case. They were really capable, but aerospace problems are really, really hard, and their safety capability regressed from being really, really capable.

They modified the flight characteristics of the system. They tuned the control scheme to provide the "same" outputs as the old system. However, the tuning relied on a sensor that was not previously safety-critical. As the sensor was not previously safety-critical, it was not subject to safety-critical requirements like having at least two redundant copies as would normally be required. They failed to identify that the sensor became safety critical and should thus be subject to such requirements. They sold configurations with redundant copies, which were purchased by most high-end airlines, but they failed to make it mandatory due to their oversight and purchasers decided to cheap out on sensors since they were characterized as non-safety-critical even if they were useful and valuable. The manual, which pilots actually read, has instructions on how to disable the automatic tuning and enable redundant control systems and such procedures were correctly deployed at least once if not multiple times to avert crashes in premier airlines. Only a combination of all of those failures simultaneously caused fatalities to occur at a rate nearly comparable to driving the same distance, how horrifying!

A error in UX tuning dependent on a sensor that was not made properly redundant was the "cause". That is not a "stupid mistake". That is a really hard mistake and downplaying it like it was a stupid mistake underestimates the challenges involved designing these systems. That does not excuse their mistake as they used to do better, much better, like 1,000x better, and we know how to do better and the better way is empirically economical. But, it does the entire debacle a disservice to claim it was just "being stupid". It was not, it was only qualifying for the Olympics when they needed to get the gold medal.

First of all, who got blamed for the 737 MAX? Boeing did. This is one of the few industries where the responsibility does not get easily sloughed off.

Second, 787s have been flying for ~13 years and ~4.5 million flights [1]. Assuming they were unaware of the problem for the majority of that time, their unknowing maintenance and usage processes avoided critical failures due to the stated problems for a tremendous number of flights. Given they now know about it and are issuing a directive to enhance their processes to explicitly handle the problem, we can assume it is even less likely to occur than previously which was already experimentally determined to be ludicrously unlikely. Suing someone into oblivion for a error that has never manifested as a serious failure and that is exceedingly unlikely to manifest is a little excessive.

Third, they should be remediating problems as they arise balanced against the risks introduced by specification changes and against the alternative of other process modifications. Given Boeing’s other recent failings, they should be given strict scrutiny that they are faithfully following the traditional, highly effective remediation processes. It should only be worrisome if they are seeing disproportionately more problems than would be expected in a aircraft design of its age and are not remediating problems robustly and promptly.

[1] https://www.boeing.com/commercial/787#overview

Commercial air travel in the US is incredibly safe. The last fatal crash was in 2009.