re: The Boeing 737 Max is a grease fire. Boeing’s Edsel

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One factor in Boeing’s apparent reluctance to heed such warnings may be attributed to the seeming transformation of the company’s engineering and safety culture over time to a finance orientation beginning with Boeing’s merger with McDonnell–Douglas in 1997 (Tkacik 2019; Useem 2019). Critical changes after the merger included replacing many in Boeing’s top management, historically engineers, with business executives from McDonnell–Douglas and moving the corporate headquarters to Chicago, while leaving the engineering staff in Seattle (Useem 2019). According to Tkacik (2019), the new management even went so far as “maligning and marginalizing engineers as a class”.

Financial drivers thus began to place an inordinate amount of strain on Boeing employees, including engineers. During the development of the 737 MAX, significant production pressure to keep pace with the Airbus 320neo was ever-present. For example, Boeing management allegedly rejected any design changes that would prolong certification or require additional pilot training for the MAX (Gelles et al. 2019). As Adam Dickson, a former Boeing engineer, explained in a television documentary (BBC Panorama 2019): “There was a lot of interest and pressure on the certification and analysis engineers in particular, to look at any changes to the Max as minor changes”.

Production pressures were exacerbated by the “cozy relationship” between Boeing and the FAA (Kitroeff et al. 2019a; see also Gelles and Kaplan 2019; Hall and Goelz 2019). Beginning in 2005, the FAA increased its reliance on manufacturers to certify their own planes. Self-certification became standard practice throughout the U.S. airline industry. By 2018, Boeing was certifying 96% of its own work (Kitroeff et al. 2019a).

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