Could there be sabotage here? Find the engineer who just happened to leave Airbus and find his way to Boeing. This is starting to look a little too pat to me. Picture a few heads getting together at Airbus, and thinking up one or two slick little booby traps that could be engineered into one or more Boeing plane models, that would cause a lot of trouble before discovery. And then draw straws to see who comes to the States and applies for a job at Boeing. Crazy me!
I was just thinking (precisely) the same thing.
Exactly.
1) They rushed the MAX program to keep up with the Airbus A320 neo series, which caught them flat-footed (with their new 797 design still years away) and took away a lot of potential 737 business.
2) They insisted on making the 737 MAX type-compatible with the previous 737 NG series, so customers wouldn't object to the expense of re-certifying pilots in the new type.
Point 2) led to the development of MCAS, which was probably not tested thoroughly enough due to point 1) - and due to the FAA essentially letting Boeing do the certification themselves.
As to the third issue of pilots from some foreign airlines essentially being trained as computer operators and not airmen, that may have directly contributed to both crashes - which I still contend were unlikely to have happened if US air crews had been operating the planes. But that doesn't exempt Boeing for designing a scenario that required such a high level of pilot skill to overcome.
Airbus doesn't need to sabotage Boeing - since they've become an official arm of the Federal Government they've been doing a pretty good job on their own.