I bet they wish they could take that decision back.
-PJ
Not (just) recertification.
(The following rant is not directed at you P.J., and for many it is old news but as a commercial/intrument ASMEL pilot and P.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, who took graduate coursework in Flight Test and Simulation, Control Theory, etc, and designed, integrated, verified, validated, simulated and otherwise developed computers, chips, software, firmware, interfaces, and software and workflow for talented people doing those things for over a 40 year career, I want to speak my perspective to this.)
Boeing management, informed by Sales, wanted to avoid requiring any additional sim or actual flying time to train pilots on the differences if they were rated in earlier models. The potential airline customers would have had their flight operations disrupted almost as much as if they had bought an Airbus designed from the beginning for the engine. So, Boeing committed to a con, told them there was nothing to it, just view an ipad familiarization app.
Maybe if thousands of transitioning airline pilots had tried flying and emergencies with an accurate sim model the MCAS issues would have surfaced and been taken seriously like they should have with internal verification by engineering test pilots during development and validation afterwards.
The Atlantic article ( https://fortune.com/2020/01/10/designed-clowns-supervised-monkeys-internal-boeing-messages-slam-737-max/ ) all but says they got cheap offsite H1Bs (Indians, etc) to develop the MCAS. The irony is Muhlenberger was the lead engineer on the Boeing entry in the air superiority fighter design and prototype flyoff competition, which was fully fly-by-wire. (the fly-off the F-22 won)
People who take life-critical firmware for granted and call engineers the reductionist ‘coders’, who try to get software cheap, fast, and good (or even safe), well they FAFO’d. Except they still don’t get it.
Better to pay the best experienced, educated, and talented programmers in the world than get cheap H1Bs. That approach to talent can cost lives, or cost your company billions in revenue loss and unrecoverable market share loss. And not just that product. Boeing has reversed a lifetime of goodwill it had earned. Boeing should have recruited and paid this team like a pro basketball team, rather than importing the cheapest, least likely to make management uncomfortable people they could bring from the Third World.
DEI didn’t create this but diversity and inclusion crap will ultimately be used as an excuse for management and HR overriding the engineersand hiring the wrong flight firmware developers.
The test and validation “chief technical pilot” could not get management to see there was a real problem. He later wrote in an internal email the airplane “designed by clowns who were in turn supervised by monkeys”.
( https://fortune.com/2020/01/10/designed-clowns-supervised-monkeys-internal-boeing-messages-slam-737-max/ )
Then Boeing apologised FOR THE TONE OF THE COMMUNICATION not the message and desperation it telegraphed when it came out in a doc dump.
Before I was an Engineer I believed shoddily engineered products were due to poor engineers and manufacturing staff. Now I know, that is rarely the case. A manager has to insist that an engineer or skilled manufacturing employee do a bad job and push trash out the door.
Another good article here that wasn’t paywalled https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/failed-certification-faa-missed-safety-issues-in-the-737-max-system-implicated-in-the-lion-air-crash/