Good day all. For the last few months, Boeing has been in panic mode as one of it’s most popular models, the 737 has been grounded and decertified for flight worthiness. This isn’t the entire fleet, only the new 737 MAX.
This all started when a control system designed to prevent the aircraft from crashing caused to planes to crash. It’s been tracked back to a design error along with a serious group of software errors. Now, it’s come out that Boeing didn’t do the programming of the flight systems in house, they outsourced it…To India. Here are the details from Bloomberg:
It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.
The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.
Once again, bean counters end up costing companies far more then their short term savings. In this case, they offshored the coding to India, specifically, HCL, which has NO experience in writing software for aircraft controls systems.
Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace — notably India.
The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”
The Bloomberg article goes on to say that Boeing benefited from outsourcing the coding to India in several ways. First, costs since Indian coders are cheap. Second, there were a few “Deals” made with India that benefited Boeing. In the end, it was all about cutting costs.
Engineers who worked on the Max, which Boeing began developing eight years ago to match a rival Airbus SE plane, have complained of pressure from managers to limit changes that might introduce extra time or cost.
“Boeing was doing all kinds of things, everything you can imagine, to reduce cost, including moving work from Puget Sound, because we’d become very expensive here,” said Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer laid off in 2017. “All that’s very understandable if you think of it from a business perspective. Slowly over time it appears that’s eroded the ability for Puget Sound designers to design.”
First, Airbus. Airbus is controlled by the European Union, and they have no problem shoveling huge amounts of government money into the company. The goal isn’t to build planes, but to provide a jobs program.
Second, and I’ve seen this happen way to many times, the accountants who take control of the financing and costs of development are incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Most of them have no technical background, and when they are the ones making decisions, quality drops and fast. They might make their numbers in the short term, but in the long term, they can bankrupt a company with recalls and lawsuits. Boeing is going to be very lucky to exist if this isn’t cleaned up quickly.
Rabin, the former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature. “I was shocked that in a room full of a couple hundred mostly senior engineers we were being told that we weren’t needed,” said Rabin, who was laid off in 2015.
I’m sure that manager was ordered to say that. Usually, managers at that level understand what a load of horse manure such statements are. They also tend to start putting together CYA files to protect themselves when things, inevitably, go wrong.
Multiple investigations – including a Justice Department criminal probe – are trying to unravel how and when critical decisions were made about the Max’s software. During the crashes of Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines planes that killed 346 people, investigators suspect, the MCAS system pushed the planes into uncontrollable dives because of bad data from a single sensor.
That design violated basic principles of redundancy for generations of Boeing engineers, and the company apparently never tested to see how the software would respond, Lemme said. “It was a stunning fail,” he said. “A lot of people should have thought of this problem – not one person – and asked about it.”
Honestly, forget the criminal and civil actions, (Although they should be continued), it’s now time for the shareholders who hold Boeing stock to start looking at replacements for the entire senior management team. Get rid of the MBA’s and bring in actual engineers with a business background.
Boeing’s share price, while in the $350/share range, has dropped significantly since this mess came to light. This report by Bloomberg is not going to help. In the end, this disaster is going to cost Boeing billions, with the worst case being that every single 737 MAX is recalled and scrapped. That would spell the end of Boeing.
Thatisall
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