The Boeing Scandal Embodies the State of Tech in 2019
This was the year we learned how easily old tech platforms adopted the flaws of the new ones
The biggest tech story of 2019 wasn’t Facebook’s questionable advertising rules or the plight of its content moderators. Nor was it Google’s inability to reign in the far right on YouTube. It wasn’t even Amazon’s quick exit from — and eventual slink back to — New York City, or its appalling labor practices. The biggest tech story of 2019 was about Boeing, the airline manufacturer.
In March, Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed shortly after takeoff outside Addis Ababa, killing all 149 passengers and 8 crew members on board. Flight 302 was the latest generation of Boeing’s longtime 737 workhorse line: the Boeing 737 Max 8. The crash drew immediate comparisons to that of a previous flight, which had similarly crashed shortly after takeoff off the Indonesian coast in late 2018, killing 189 people. The Max 8 had a problem.
Investigators soon found the fault to lie with Boeing’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. Essentially a stall prevention mechanism, MCAS used sensors at the front of the plane to detect its angle of attack, meaning its position relative to airflow that generates lift. If that angle became too great, suggesting…
