Somehow I am getting the impression FAA has not done its task...and demanded more redundant MCAS for the 737 MAX in the first place ?
Deregulation. The FAA was told to offload the work to Boeing.
Yup. Much of that was budget (good engineers aren't cheap) but a lot of that is practicality. The FAA overseer should be at least as good as the engineer who's doing the work...but how do they get that way with a 25-year career of pushing FAA paper? Especially when an experienced corporate engineer will have to take a pay cut (and lose pension) to leave their company. In addition, good engineers LIKE doing engineering. Paper-pushing, checking government boxes, has little appeal.
So the FAA has what's called Authorized Representatives (ARs). These are employees of the company (Boeing in this case) who are extremely qualified engineers who are assigned to be the FAA's watchdogs during development. We in the homebuilt world are familiar with "Designated Airworthiness Representatives" (DARs)....they're basically the same thing. Designated Engineering Representatives (DERs) are also out there. They can work as independents, but for big companies like Boeing, there's enough work that it makes sense to have them as full-time hires. "AR" is basically a term combining the two types.
The program has been around for quite a long while. Boeing has produced a lot of good airplanes using ARs to monitor safety.
Then came the McDonnell Douglas takeover of Boeing's commercial aircraft business. I'm sure McD's used ARs as well, but the sheer economic size of the merger brought a new drive for cost-cutting...and, to some extent, an alienation between Boeing's engineers and Boeing's managers.
Prior to the merger, the majority of Boeing managers and executives "worked their way up" through the engineering ranks. They knew the airplane business. What's more, it enhanced the feeling of teamwork. My lead engineer in one program in 1994 was the executive in charge of my organization six years later. I had a young woman just out of college as a mentee in 2008. She was my manager when I retired in 2017...and is currently in executive training. But we're in an insulated spacecraft-development area, not strongly affected by the merger.
The McD merger brought in a bunch of strangers to lead aircraft development and production. That in itself wasn't bad...but a lot of the managers, expecially the higher execs, came from industries OTHER than aviation. The new attitude was that making airplanes was no different that making toasters. The drive for higher profits was on; no longer the emphasis on developing good products, we were expected to "enhance shareholder value."
This came to a head in early 2000. The Boeing engineer's union had never called a strike, but the new McD leadership didn't have the close relationship with their engineering work force and managed to tick us off. The head of human relations was quoted in the paper as saying, "...engineers are prima-donnas who thought the world revolved around them.”
For more details about the strike, see my old Avweb article at:
https://www.avweb.com/features/the-boeing-strike-a-report-from-the-trenches/
I think much of Boeing management thought that an engineer's strike wouldn't affect production. The machinists' union handled actually aircraft construction, agreements between the two unions allowed members to cross each other's picket lines. Production and deliveries would continue, using managers. Boeing would still receive the payments for new airplanes, and the engineer's strike shouldn't affect business for months.
But the toaster execs forgot one thing: The ARs. ARs handled the licensing and final certification on behalf of the FAA...and the ARs were members of the engineering union. They walked, and deliveries STOPPED.
The machinists were gleeful. While the engineer's union had traditionally been the company's lapdog, the machinsts' union had a far more adversarial relationship. They love the chance to stick it to the company. So they kept producing airplanes, and pushing them onto the ramp...where they sat. Boeing's customers were livid that Boeing's management hadn't anticipated the AR issue.
After forty days, a settlement was reached. The engineers, including the ARs, went back to work.
And the toaster execs started work to remove the ARs from the engineering union. That failed, but what DID happen is that they placed the ARs more closely under control.
A recent Seattle Times article explained how that affected 737 Max development. With union protections, ARs who held out for stricter standards or demanded more in-depth testing coudn't be fired. They were merely reassigned, taken off the 737 Max program entirely, and a more amenable AR assigned. Those more attuned to maintaining schedule and reducing costs. Those who believed in "enhancing shareholder value."
Ron Wanttaja
.) If you measure just the stock price, the New Way managers have done well. If you look at some of the messes - eh - not so well.
