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Thread: Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

  1. #1

    Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...hour-engineers

    excerpts:
    It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.

    The Max software -- plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw -- was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.

    Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India.
    Laying off experienced Americans and outsourcing to India, what could possibly go wrong?!

    The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”
    Anybody with any real experience could have told you that was going to be the case.

    Rabin, the former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature. “I was shocked that in a room full of a couple hundred mostly senior engineers we were being told that we weren’t needed,” said Rabin, who was laid off in 2015.
    well that's a sure recipe for future success...



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  3. #2
    Multi-Multi-nationalism for the fail.
    "The Patriarch"

  4. #3
    Great, now that there's a body count associated with subcontracting to India, maybe it'll stop.
    There are no crimes against people.
    There are only crimes against the state.
    And the state will never, ever choose to hold accountable its agents, because a thing can not commit a crime against itself.

  5. #4
    I no longer participate in that industry .
    Do something Danke

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by fisharmor View Post
    Great, now that there's a body count associated with subcontracting to India, maybe it'll stop.
    Just remember that the root cause of this is the US government making it too expensive to hire US workers. Boeing probably wants to hire locally but it's too expensive.

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    Just remember that the root cause of this is the US government making it too expensive to hire US workers. Boeing probably wants to hire locally but it's too expensive.
    maybe, maybe not:
    Sales are another reason to send the work overseas. In exchange for an $11 billion order in 2005 from Air India, Boeing promised to invest $1.7 billion in Indian companies. That was a boon for HCL and other software developers from India, such as Cyient, whose engineers were widely used in computer-services industries but not yet prominent in aerospace.

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    Just remember that the root cause of this is the US government making it too expensive to hire US workers. Boeing probably wants to hire locally but it's too expensive.
    Or not.

    The globalists want to break the back of the US middle class and reduce us to the political power level and living standard of 3rd world peasants.
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  9. #8
    Per registered decision, member has been banned for violating community standards as interpreted by TheTexan (respect his authoritah) as authorized by Brian4Liberty Ruling

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    Last edited by Voluntarist; 01-04-2020 at 06:10 PM.
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  11. #9
    It shows how rigged the stock markets are that Boeing's stock price hasn't been cut completely in half yet and is barely down from the price when the Max was first grounded.
    "Let it not be said that we did nothing."-Ron Paul

    "We have set them on the hobby-horse of an idea about the absorption of individuality by the symbolic unit of COLLECTIVISM. They have never yet and they never will have the sense to reflect that this hobby-horse is a manifest violation of the most important law of nature, which has established from the very creation of the world one unit unlike another and precisely for the purpose of instituting individuality."- A Quote From Some Old Book

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Or not.

    The globalists want to break the back of the US middle class and reduce us to the political power level and living standard of 3rd world peasants.
    This is exactly what's happening.

  13. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Or not.

    The globalists want to break the back of the US middle class and reduce us to the political power level and living standard of 3rd world peasants.
    Perhaps a distinction without a difference but it's the globalist bankers doing that, as the dollar reserve system is killed and wealth redistributed to "emerging economies", being made safe for bankers. The same dudes Trump loaded his cabinet with...
    Last edited by devil21; 12-17-2019 at 04:00 PM.
    "Let it not be said that we did nothing."-Ron Paul

    "We have set them on the hobby-horse of an idea about the absorption of individuality by the symbolic unit of COLLECTIVISM. They have never yet and they never will have the sense to reflect that this hobby-horse is a manifest violation of the most important law of nature, which has established from the very creation of the world one unit unlike another and precisely for the purpose of instituting individuality."- A Quote From Some Old Book

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Voluntarist View Post
    And of course Boeing takes the software and other assemblies and components, and just integrates them into their aircraft systems without checking them out. They aren't building washing machines, they're building some of the most complex and necessarily reliable machines on the planet. The key to the supply chains needed to achieve this, whether the supply chain be spread across the planet, or strictly in the US, or even kept in-house at Boeing, is to adequately define the requirements when you subcontract the assemblies and components out; and then to thoroughly verify and validate the assemblies and components when they are delivered to assure they meet the requirements you defined when you contracted them out. And then, as you integrate them, you put each level of integrated product through further verification, validation and finally certification. All that final-chain verification, validation and certification is done on US soil by Boeing's US engineers. It's the firewall keeping inferior product from leaking through to the market. That's why Boeing's American Engineers are paid so well. And Boeing failed at it. Some Boeing US Engineer(s) knew and didn't do what it took to keep inferior product off the market. Maybe the requirements contracted out were ill-defined. Maybe the engineer didn't stand up to a manager to whom schedule was more important than quality. Maybe some executive overruled quality to improve delivery stats needed for a bonus. Regardless, the firewall was on American soil, and it didn't stop inferior product from reaching market.
    Software is difficult to test. If you simply test against a few specs, you probably haven’t tested every possibility.

    But in this case, the simulator test pilots did find the problems, but it was swept under the rug and ignored.

    Software often goes out with bugs. It can be unit tested, integration tested, load tested, system tested, alpha tested and beta tested, but often problems are found when it’s released into massive use. This is pretty much what happened with Boeing’s 737 Max 8. It was released to the public, and that’s when the errors and unexpected results were found.
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  15. #13
    Per registered decision, member has been banned for violating community standards as interpreted by TheTexan (respect his authoritah) as authorized by Brian4Liberty Ruling

    May God have mercy on his atheist, police-hating, non-voting, anarchist soul.
    Last edited by Voluntarist; 01-04-2020 at 06:11 PM.
    You have the right to remain silent. Anything you post to the internet can and will be used to humiliate you.

  16. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Voluntarist View Post
    Oh, it goes far beyond that. The software performed in accordance with its original requirements in attempting to compensate for an unsafe angle of attack. Unfortunately, the requirements consciously avoided dealing with redundancy of inputs with respect to the angle of attack. In the two crashes, the software was fed erroneous data from faulty angle of attack sensors, and in each case attempted to level out what the faulty sensor was reporting as an angle of attack that could result in a stall.

    The faulty sensors were produced by Burnsville, Minnesota-based Rosemount Aerospace which is owned by United Technologies. Both are American companies. What's more, the sensor on the Lion Air aircraft had previously been diagnosed with problems and had been repaired by Xtra Aerospace, another American company located in Miramar, Florida. The repaired sensor had supposedly conformed to and passed all required and mandated tests before being put back into service - which would tend to indicate that the tests were insufficiently spec'ed. The primary reason the flight control software is in the news is that it had to be re-spec'ed to compensate for the sensor failures ... plus they're having to address a host of other requirement lapses, many of which had originally been deemed below the risk threshold of a catastrophic loss.
    It kinda sounds to me like the plane is inherently physically unstable if it had so many problems with the software. I would think a more stable design would be able to overcome some software glitches.

    It reminds me of the newer nuclear power plants that won't overheat, even if it loses power. Compared to the older designs that are inherently unstable and rely on quadruple backup systems to make sure they don't blow up.

  17. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Or not.

    The globalists want to break the back of the US middle class and reduce us to the political power level and living standard of 3rd world peasants.
    Yeah, we should just regulate the crap out of boeing, or even better just nationalize them. That always works.

    Personally I prefer to move towards liberty instead of towards a command and control socialist economy.

  18. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by specsaregood View Post
    maybe, maybe not:
    We should build a wall and not let any American company do business with outsiders. Shoot those damn Boeing executives if we catch 'em trying to escape.



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  20. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    It kinda sounds to me like the plane is inherently physically unstable if it had so many problems with the software. I would think a more stable design would be able to overcome some software glitches.

    It reminds me of the newer nuclear power plants that won't overheat, even if it loses power. Compared to the older designs that are inherently unstable and rely on quadruple backup systems to make sure they don't blow up.
    There was not redundancy as it only took an input from one AOA vane, not two that were on board. If there was a disagreement from a malfunctioning vane, it should have not activated.

    But, in either case, it should have been taught to the pilots and an easy/quick way to override the system.
    Last edited by Danke; 12-18-2019 at 06:24 PM.
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  21. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    It kinda sounds to me like the plane is inherently physically unstable if it had so many problems with the software. I would think a more stable design would be able to overcome some software glitches.

    It reminds me of the newer nuclear power plants that won't overheat, even if it loses power. Compared to the older designs that are inherently unstable and rely on quadruple backup systems to make sure they don't blow up.
    The original story was that Boeing didn't want to (spend the time and money to) redesign a large portion of the plane to accommodate the new "greener" engines they required, so instead they shoehorned the new engines onto the existing 737 airframe and tried to fix the change in flight behaviors of the plane using sensors and software. Didn't work out so well. How they think they'll be able to make it work this time is beyond me, since it's still a cobble job of a plane not meant to carry those engines.
    "Let it not be said that we did nothing."-Ron Paul

    "We have set them on the hobby-horse of an idea about the absorption of individuality by the symbolic unit of COLLECTIVISM. They have never yet and they never will have the sense to reflect that this hobby-horse is a manifest violation of the most important law of nature, which has established from the very creation of the world one unit unlike another and precisely for the purpose of instituting individuality."- A Quote From Some Old Book

  22. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    Yeah, we should just regulate the crap out of boeing, or even better just nationalize them. That always works.

    Personally I prefer to move towards liberty instead of towards a command and control socialist economy.
    What has that got to do with what I said?
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  23. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    It kinda sounds to me like the plane is inherently physically unstable if it had so many problems with the software. I would think a more stable design would be able to overcome some software glitches.

    It reminds me of the newer nuclear power plants that won't overheat, even if it loses power. Compared to the older designs that are inherently unstable and rely on quadruple backup systems to make sure they don't blow up.
    An aircraft can be perfectly stable through the normal flight regime, but have a bad characteristic when approaching a critical limit.

    If fact, this describes all large aircraft that I've flown.

    Small aircraft (think Cessna, Piper, etc single engine) are marvels of sound engineering in that they behave nicely and predictably in all phases of critical flight. This is because these aircraft were designed with flight training in the critical limits in mind. These nice qualities do not scale upward in large aircraft. If you look at the ass-end of a B737 for example, you will see a lot of little things sticking up off the surface of the tail and horizontal elevator. These are called vortex generators that are there to compensate for some unpleasant flight characteristic.

    Personally, I think that a stall recovery system based on software through the flight control system is madness. In my perfect world, this system would be a stand-alone system based on hard and redundant inputs.

    But nobody cares about what I want in my perfect world because industry has given us fly-by-wire which, in a way, makes notions of stability a bit irrelevant. An unstable aircraft with bad manners can be made to fly straight and level, stand up and do tricks with enough computers and enough lines of code and inputs.

    When industry and the regulators have all decided that your fate can be safely placed in the hands of a microprocessor and software solely pulling on the flight controls, they have already embraced the concept of the control systems of the B737Max and they can simply wait for that perfect clean copy of code which will fix everything. Until that next regrettable hiccup occurs.

  24. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Danke View Post
    There was not redundancy as it only took an input from one AOA vane, not two that were on board. If there was a disagreement from a malfunctioning vane, it should have not activated.

    But, in either case, it should have been taught to the pilots and an easy/quick way to override the system.
    At least they got the smoke detectors connected right?
    Boeing has also expanded a design center in Moscow. At a meeting with a chief 787 engineer in 2008, one staffer complained about sending drawings back to a team in Russia 18 times before they understood that the smoke detectors needed to be connected to the electrical system, said Cynthia Cole, a former Boeing engineer who headed the engineers’ union from 2006 to 2010.

  25. #22
    Per registered decision, member has been banned for violating community standards as interpreted by TheTexan (respect his authoritah) as authorized by Brian4Liberty Ruling

    May God have mercy on his atheist, police-hating, non-voting, anarchist soul.
    Last edited by Voluntarist; 01-04-2020 at 06:12 PM.
    You have the right to remain silent. Anything you post to the internet can and will be used to humiliate you.

  26. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by Voluntarist View Post
    Awesome user name for the observation; because, without seeing the spec, I can't make any judgment upon what happened. Suppliers are notorious for doing the bare minimum to satisfy the requirements levied on them in a spec. Suppliers don't get paid extra to solve the system integrator's problems for them up front..
    The first thing I do after getting a spec is to review it and look for potential problems, missing functionality, design issues.
    With that said, its really just a way of pointing out some of the unforeseen difficulties and expenses of building stuff globally. I've had a few of those 18round and back emails trying to get a simple stupid point across.

  27. #24
    You have the right to remain silent. Anything you post to the internet can and will be used to humiliate you.



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  29. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by sparebulb View Post
    An aircraft can be perfectly stable through the normal flight regime, but have a bad characteristic when approaching a critical limit.

    If fact, this describes all large aircraft that I've flown.

    Small aircraft (think Cessna, Piper, etc single engine) are marvels of sound engineering in that they behave nicely and predictably in all phases of critical flight. This is because these aircraft were designed with flight training in the critical limits in mind. These nice qualities do not scale upward in large aircraft. If you look at the ass-end of a B737 for example, you will see a lot of little things sticking up off the surface of the tail and horizontal elevator. These are called vortex generators that are there to compensate for some unpleasant flight characteristic.

    Personally, I think that a stall recovery system based on software through the flight control system is madness. In my perfect world, this system would be a stand-alone system based on hard and redundant inputs.

    But nobody cares about what I want in my perfect world because industry has given us fly-by-wire which, in a way, makes notions of stability a bit irrelevant. An unstable aircraft with bad manners can be made to fly straight and level, stand up and do tricks with enough computers and enough lines of code and inputs.

    When industry and the regulators have all decided that your fate can be safely placed in the hands of a microprocessor and software solely pulling on the flight controls, they have already embraced the concept of the control systems of the B737Max and they can simply wait for that perfect clean copy of code which will fix everything. Until that next regrettable hiccup occurs.
    That reminds me of something else that irritates me. I was listening to someone who designs semi trucks and they were talking about how those giant double trailers are really safer than the single ones because they have way more safety features built into them. I'm thinking why not put those same safety features into the single ones then they'd be REALLY safe instead of just pushing the edge of the safety envelope. Same with planes. I'd rather see them make improvements to reasonable sized planes like maybe 737s instead of trying to offset the inherent instability of a larger plane with better software. If that makes any sense.

  30. #26
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    What has that got to do with what I said?
    I thought you were suggesting the government should regulate Boeing and who it hires. If not, never mind!

  31. #27
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    I thought you were suggesting the government should regulate Boeing and who it hires. If not, never mind!
    The problem here is that the government has destroyed competition in the airplane business by a variety of means so that companies like Boeing can pursue globalist goals at the expense of quality and safety without losing business to companies that don't.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  32. #28
    Quote Originally Posted by devil21 View Post
    The original story was that Boeing didn't want to (spend the time and money to) redesign a large portion of the plane to accommodate the new "greener" engines they required, so instead they shoehorned the new engines onto the existing 737 airframe and tried to fix the change in flight behaviors of the plane using sensors and software. Didn't work out so well. How they think they'll be able to make it work this time is beyond me, since it's still a cobble job of a plane not meant to carry those engines.
    Yeah, that's what I thought I heard also. They were trying to overcome physical design flaws by tweaking the software. Sounds like an accident waiting to happen to me.

  33. #29
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    The problem here is that the government has destroyed competition in the airplane business by a variety of means so that companies like Boeing can pursue globalist goals at the expense of quality and safety without losing business to companies that don't.
    I have no idea what you mean. Are you in favor of the government regulating Boeing and preventing them from hiring who they want? Yes or no?

  34. #30
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    I have no idea what you mean. Are you in favor of the government regulating Boeing and preventing them from hiring who they want? Yes or no?
    I am not in favor of the government regulating who Boeing can hire (there might be obvious exceptions for when Boeing is working on military projects etc.).

    I am saying that if the government didn't interfere in the marketplace in ways that give Boeing and a few other companies a near monopoly that Boeing would never have dared to hire incompetent foreigners because they were cheap and would have hired competent Americans instead.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

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