From The Evening Standard:
Planes giant Boeing was humiliated on Friday after hundreds of internal emails showed staff fraught with concerns over possible design flaws on the 737 MAX, saying the doomed jet had been “designed by clowns”...
According to documents released to Congress today, Boeing employees repeatedly raised concerns internally about design issues, with one person involved saying software had “piss poor” design and was “doomed”.
“This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” the employee wrote in April 2017. Another employee involved in the jet’s development wrote: “Part of me wants to see it fail so we can say WE TOLD YOU SO. That’s kind of sick of me, huh.”
That seems pretty damning to me, you'd think that Boeing would just keep quiet and pray for lenience.
But no:
Boeing apologised for the messages. “The language used in these communications, and some of the sentiments they express, are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response.”
Exactly not.
Those emails are entirely consistent with Boeing's (lack of) values, as evidenced by the subsequent 737 disasters and botched cover-up attempts. Boeing shouldn't be apologising for the messages, they should be apologising for the crimes (that were exposed by the messages). The "appropriate action" would be to never cut corners like this again and listen to their engineers' concerns in future.
Debate Magazine
