Slashdot: Facing Sharp Questions, Boeing CEO Refuses To Admit Flaws in 737 MAX Design

Facing Sharp Questions, Boeing CEO Refuses To Admit Flaws in 737 MAX Design
Published on April 30, 2019 at 08:30PM
Iwastheone shares a report: In a tense and steely news conference, his first since two deadly crashes of 737 MAX airplanes, Boeing Chairman and CEO Dennis Muilenburg faced sharp questioning but refused to admit flaws in the design of the airplane's systems. "We have gone back and confirmed again, as we do the safety analysis, the engineering analysis, that we followed exactly the steps in our design and certification processes that consistently produce safe airplanes," he said. "It was designed per our standards. It was certified per our standards." In the case of the MAX, those processes certified as safe a new flight-control system that was triggered on both the Lion Air and Ethiopian crash flights by a single faulty sensor and then engaged repeatedly to push the nose of each airplane down. Boeing is currently flight testing a software redesign of this system -- Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). Yet Muilenburg would not concede that there was anything wrong with the original MCAS design, saying only that the system is being "improved" with the software redesign. He said airplane accidents are typically due to "a chain of events," and that "it's not correct to attribute that to any single item."

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