I was reading this PBS story on the recent Alaskan Airlines incident in which a door panel blew off in midair and it tickled a distant memory of a post I wrote about Boeing before. A simple search of Irreal revealed two posts [1, 2] from 2019 that discussed the far more serious incidents that resulted in significant loss of lives.
Read the posts. They stand up pretty well, I think. The TL;DR is that Boeing, which had been the aircraft industry leader for as long as there has been an aircraft industry, was always an engineering centered company. Basically, the engineers ran the company. That is, they were until some meddling by politicians pressured them to merge with McDonnell Douglas, which in turn led to the capture of the company by the suits. These were guys with the very necessary knowledge of things like finance and marketing but who knew little about aviation. Rather than concentrating on what they knew best, the suits started making engineering decisions. I needn’t tell you the results.
Boeing, apparently, learned nothing from their last fiasco. The evidence isn’t all in yet but Alaskan Airlines and other airlines have discovered loose bolts on the door plug that probably caused the incident.
This is what happens when “professional managers” with no engineering expertise think they should make engineering decisions. Read that second post from 2019 and notice the arrogance of their CEO and his smug description of “the Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers.
This principal has equal application to our own industry. When people with no engineering experience start making all the decisions, the end of the company is foretold. I’ve seen it firsthand and I’m sure many of you have too.