I saw that report on the news.
But as the long segment continued, I kept waiting for the link between the practices the whistleblower complained about and the failure of the MCAS system that led to the two 737 Max accidents. It never came.
I’m in no way saying that the issues were not egregious enough to conceivably lead to an accident. Only that it appears they did not in these cases.
Here's the thing though - there may not be a direct link between the management of Boeing and the failure of MCAS, but it the whole culture at Boeing was toxic. That kind of culture comes down from the hierarchy, and it affects the WHOLE company in all its various departments. I will digress for a moment to explain
With my interest in both Aviation and Space Technology, I have become fairly well read and quite familiar concerning the failings at NASA that led to both the Challenger and Columbia disasters. What I am seeing at Boeing is looking very familiar, particularly such things as
"normalisation of deviance", a concept in which, when problems occur, and continue to occur even though no critical failure occurs in a given flight, the engineers start to accept this as a normal failure rather than fully investigating them and trying to ascertain of any of those problems could lead to more serious failure modes
In the case of Challenger, engineers knew that there had been a number of previous occasions when the O-Rings had come close to complete failure, but they tended to minimize their concern. Only one engineer,
Roger Boisjoly, truly recognised the potential for catastrophic failure, but he was sidelined by the engineering bosses.
In the case of Columbia, engineers knew that large chunks of insulating foam regularly broke off during launch. This was mostly, early in the launch - low speed low altitude, and was just accepted as normal. No one investigated what might happen if a chunk broke off off after Max Q when the shuttle was travelling at Mach 2+
Now back to the case of Boeing and the Max 8, Boeing knew there were reports of the aircraft pitching nose down against the commands of the pilot. They also knew that some of their own engineers were really concerned that MCAS was not always working the way it was supposed to. While there was a procedure for how to deal with this problem, no-one really checked if those procedures were even feasible. Boeing
"normalised this deviance" from correct operations, effectively saying that the pilots would deal with it if it happened.... and then they failed to even tell the pilots about it at all.
In all three cases I have talked about above, it is the toxic and lackadaisical culture that sets the stage for these kinds of errors of judgement to be made. The culture at NASA at those times, and the culture at Boeing now, are strikingly similar - too similar to ignore.
Further reading about the NASA culture at the time of Challenger and Columbia, for those who are interested (its only 9 pages)
https://josephhall.org/papers/nasa.pdf
