<story><title>Boeing engineer breaks silence on MAX 737</title><url>https://kuow.org/stories/boeing-engineers-break-silence-on-max-737-read-this-letter</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ltbarcly3</author><text>This comment from a &amp;#x27;boeing engineer&amp;#x27; has basically no information content.&lt;p&gt;- He&amp;#x27;s not a Boeing engineer, he&amp;#x27;s &amp;#x27;a senior member of the union&amp;#x27;.  Apparently he was an engineer sometime in the past, now his job is to push anything that will benefit members of the union, which is what he is doing here.  He has no specific information about the MAX to offer.&lt;p&gt;- Cost savings is &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; the root cause of every engineering failure, so long as you have the benefit of hindsight.  I mean once you know what the problem is you can spend money to fix it, and they should have spent that money right off the bat, right?  I mean, if they knew there was a problem, which they must have or else there is nobody to blame.  We need someone to blame! Of course projects that don&amp;#x27;t try to limit costs can&amp;#x27;t fail since they are canceled and never built.  Except for the Space Shuttle, which went massively over budget again and again and still had a terrible safety record, which absurdly was blamed on &lt;i&gt;cost cutting&lt;/i&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wired.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;to-cut-costs-and-save-time-nasas-taking-more-risks&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wired.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;to-cut-costs-and-save-time-nas...&lt;/a&gt;  So no matter how much money you spend, when something fails you are going to be blamed for not spending more.  If you budget $1 Billion and then decide to spend $10 Billion to improve safety, whenever something goes wrong they&amp;#x27;ll say you should have spent $11 Billion.&lt;p&gt;- Trying to vilify people and attempting to create an environment to produce massive punitive damages and lawsuits, or to bring political pressure to change staffing decisions dramatically decreases safety.  The FAA has spent almost a hundred years building up an environment of cooperation with a shared responsibility to understand failures and enable the changing of the entire aviation industry whenever necessary to promote safety.  This has been fabulously successful.  Trying to place blame and attack people for past decisions will only lead to a closing of the culture and an attempt to hide information in the future.  Compare aviation to the auto industry in how they adapt and improve safety, it&amp;#x27;s night and day for exactly this reason.  Creating an environment where companies have to be afraid to admit mistakes does not help us find the root causes of problems and change the system to prevent those problems in the future.</text></comment>
<story><title>Boeing engineer breaks silence on MAX 737</title><url>https://kuow.org/stories/boeing-engineers-break-silence-on-max-737-read-this-letter</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>It reminds me of the adage &amp;quot;Workplace culture is what you &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; not what you &lt;i&gt;say you do&lt;/i&gt;.&amp;quot; I have met too many engineering managers over the years who thought they could cleverly have it both ways by exhorting quality is the highest priority while penalizing or criticizing engineers who objected based on quality or design metrics.</text></comment>