I'm not sure how unions have any relations to this. They exist as a mediator between management and workers for pay and rights; customer satisfaction or safety is completely outside their domain
Unions give employees the knowledge and leverage to push back against unrealistic demands, deadlines, and cost-cutting measures without retaliation. These kinds of rushed solutions causing more problems down the line are caused by a culture that rewards employees who put up with managers breathing down their neck.
Irrelevant in this case, though. While concerns have indeed been raised about SC production quality, this particular story involves an engineering failure, not a production issue. Boeing engineers are unionized through SPEEA. They can bring the company to its knees at contract negotiation time, and they have done so in the past.
I disagree, it is also a production issue because:
"One whistleblower reported to the FAA that they had seen damage to the electrical wiring connected to the plane’s angle of attack sensor from a foreign object, which feeds data to the MCAS system so it can determine whether it needs to engage to prevent the plane from stalling. This wouldn’t be the first time Boeing’s manufacturing process reportedly had problems guarding plane components against foreign object debris produced by the fabrication process."
Stuff happens. The fact that damage to a single AOA sensor -- whether in the factory or in the field -- could cause this sort of event is strictly an engineering issue.
It is most definitely not "strictly" an engineering issue.
By that logic you can say it is a quality control, FAA or management issue (and not an engineering issue) - because the engineering problem was not caught by other systems.
Also "engineering" created the AoA disagree alert. Whoever decided to make that an optional feature should be "strictly" at fault? Maybe it is the fault of the airlines that decided not to have that feature installed?
Engineering is just one part of a complex system so why do you think engineering should be blamed 100% for failures that occurred due to the whole system?
Engineering is just one part of a complex system so why do you think engineering should be blamed 100% for failures that occurred due to the whole system?
Because that's the only way something this complicated can possibly work. Fault tolerance is optional only if failure is considered to be a valid option.
Getting back to what happened in this case: at some point, a Boeing engineer was asked to make MCAS work with input from only one AoA sensor. That person could have made all the difference by saying, "Lol no," and SPEEA would have had their back.
You should be rebutting my points. To rebut your new points:
I think failure is always acceptable engineering: a defining feature of engineering is finding compromises because we don't have infinite resources, infinite ability, or perfect materials.
> a Boeing engineer was asked to make MCAS work
That sounds like you are just making stuff up about a team of engineers. So your opinion is this is all the fault of a single engineer? Not engineering after all?
1. Add MCAS system to artificially make airplane fly as if it were a different airplane.
2. Drive MCAS with only one AOA sensor.
3. Don't tell MCAS to look for (or even think about) bad AOA data or AOA disagreements.
4. Equip airplane with two AOA sensors as usual, but make the AOA disagree warning light a "value added option" that customers have to pay extra for.
5. Don't actually bother to tell pilots that they don't have AOA disagree warning lights.
6. Don't bother to tell pilots that MCAS exists at all.
7. Don't test MCAS subsystem to see what it actually does with bad AOA data.
8. Give MCAS a ridiculous amount of control authority, operating cumulatively over repeated applications to exceed what the pilot can manually override.
Now, exactly what items on this list are the responsibility of non-union labor in a South Carolina assembly plant, or whatever other mistuned horn you're tooting? Once again, in the absence of gross engineering malpractice, a broken AOA sensor is no big deal.
Another poster cited a small anecdote about a Boeing whistleblower:
> In another case, a whistleblower in charge of defective inventory found that some of the items marked defective were going missing and ending up installed on aircraft to meet production goals rather than wait for a proper replacement, the red paint marking them defective having been clumsily rubbed off.
In a unionized workforce, people are far more confident about pushing back on this sort of criminal bullshit, when their manager asks it of them. (Because getting rid of someone in a union shop requires a paper trail. And people making illegal demands hate, hate, hate paper trails.)
In a non-unionized workforce, the only recourse we, as the public have is to jail the line workers who scrubbed the paint, while their managers will quietly deny any wrongdoing (Of course we didn't suggest this sort of thing, of course we had no idea this was happening, of course we didn't pressure anyone into doing something so blatantly unethical, under express or implied threat of termination...)
We just told people that we need them to ship 100 parts, and waggled our eyelashes suggestively at a box labeled '100 defective parts'.
