Boeing outsourced the 737 Max software to engineers paid $9 AN HOUR!

[thewayne]

Because India has such a fantastic and established commercial aerospace industry and you can get incredibly amazing code written for $9 and hour.

To recap, the 737 Max is a plane designed to compete with less expensive Airbus aircraft. It is different from previous 737s in that they moved the engines significantly ahead of the wing, radically changing flight characteristics, requiring new software.

Boeing thought that their processes were so mature that the software could be sent out to an Indian contractor that charges ridiculously low rates, and the result was they got horrible code that had to go back and forth between Boeing and the contractor, negating any savings because the experienced and mature coders would have gotten it right pretty much the first time.

Two planes have crashed because of flight control software that thought the plane was stalling during the take-off phase. The software insisted on pushing the nose down, which during take-off means you're dead. In an Airbus, when the flight control software does that, you just pull back on the stick and it overrides and cuts out the software. No problem. Not so in the 737 Max. You have to remember to hit a certain series of switches or disengage a circuit breaker, which in the heat of the moment as the ground is rushing up at you, is an extremely hard thing to do.

With the 737 Max, when the software insists on pushing the nose down, no amount of force trying to pull the control column back will make any difference at all. Only doing the override sequence or pulling the circuit breaker will save you.

This information is going to slaughter Boeing in court.

Thank you, profit culture that says to cut all expenses to the bone!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers


Edit to add:
A week and a half ago at the Paris Air Show, the International Airlines Group (IAG), which owns, among other things, Aer Lingus, British Airways and Iberia, signed a letter of intent to buy TWO HUNDRED 737 Max jets! Somehow Boeing convinced them to refresh their fleet, switching over from Airbus A320s. Curious, indeed: hookers & blow, bribery, blackmail, all of the above....

Letter of intent being rescinded in 3... 2...

https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/paris-air-show-boeing-gets-order-for-200-max-jets/

Comments

[graydon]

Be interesting to watch an attempt to use US soft power to keep people buying Boeing aircraft. It's not likely to work.

[thewayne]

Under a previous administration, the might have happened.  But under the current regime, Our Beloved Leader has so smeared the name of the USA that he only has threats, and that will only take you so far.  I just edited the entry: an airline group placed an order for 200 Max aircraft worth $24bil.  I wonder how long before that letter is rescinded.

[graydon]

I would not expect too long.

It's not just the stall-detection failure that's concerning.

The thing about the engine change is that the engines chosen -- also in a "save money, avoid long development" way are what makes the 737 MAX unstable; the airframe is not meant to have that much drag in those places.

Boeing was getting away with this by stating that they'd solved it in software and implying that there was US military secret sauce in there to make the -- insanely challenging! -- software problem one they could have solved in that span of time for that much money. It was believable; Boeing has had a very friendly relationship with the DoD. As it comes out that the software was a complete disaster as a development process, the expectation that the aircraft will work at all in a "safe to operate" sense is lost.

Can't think of anybody who has recovered from this kind of thing in the commercial aviation field.

[thewayne]

It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.  They found another problem with the Max, but probably unrelated to the crashes.  Myself, I formerly preferred to fly Boeing because their planes weren't exclusively fly-by-wire.  If something began to go wrong, the pilots still had some mechanical control.  That appealed to me.  Airbus is entirely FBW.  But with crap like this coming to light - maybe Airbus is the safer aircraft.  When we flew trans-Atlantic to Germany four years ago, we flew a 747 Denver to Frankfurt and an Airbus Berlin to New Jersey, and the return was definitely more comfortable, but we were also upgraded to "Coach Plus" and had slightly roomier seating.

[graydon]

Airbus had a couple public disasters decades ago. It wasn't absolutely certainly a software problem and they took the problem very very seriously. Still put them back about a decade despite unwavering EU backing.

Today, I suspect it matters what you've got the; the 747s will be fine. 787s and the 737 MAX would make me nervous.

[dewline]

Except that the Vulgarian's been actively tweeting to undermine the Boeing/USDoD relationship from day one post-Inauguration, hasn't he?

[graydon]

Boeing makes the cruise missiles; I suspect Putin has nudged them on to Trump's dislike list if they weren't already there. (they seem to have been, for whatever Trumpian reasons.)

The sales process started well before 2016; it's the lack of help recovering from the massive ghastly oops that's going to matter now, I think.

[conuly]

Wow.

[thewayne]

Yep, that about sums it up.  Executive board bonuses, anyone?

[dewline]

They'll get those bonuses anyway because corporate tradition?

[thewayne]

Probably.

[silveradept]

Any time a company thinks they can trust critical systems to the lowest bidder, something like this happens. One would think there were appropriate regulations and enforcement to prevent such a problem from going into production, but it's apparently a fool's game to think that regulations do anything in this administration. (Or many others.)

[thewayne]

They've been going to that 'we can regulate ourselves, thenkyewveddymuch' routine for a while now, and now people might start questioning 'the government small enough to drown in a bathtub.  I wonder how many are going to have to die from food contamination for that aspect to be questioned.  I guess since it was mostly brown people that died, the 25% of Americans that elected our current administration aren't too concerned yet.

[silveradept]

Entirely likely. Once there's enough people that are important that die, then we'll do something, but so long as it's brown people Somewhere Else, we don't care.

[foreverdawning]

Everyone who says they love pure capitalism (as opposed to funding social programs) because it makes people work hard...I just want them to see that this is the outcome: cheapest labor for work that should never be sold for cheap.

[thewayne]

B.I.N.G.O.  "The market will regulate itself!"