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
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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 the plane was about to stall, MCAS automatically adjusted the horizontal stabilizer fin to force the nose of the plane back down. MCAS was theoretically supposed to avert disaster, not cause it. But in the case of both crashes, MCAS is believed to have forced the plane’s nose down due to erroneous information from sensors, causing them to crash.
Boeing pushed to develop the 737 Max in 2011, out of a desperate need to catch up to Airbus and offer a modern alternative to the A320Neo, which debuted a year earlier. But in its push to stay competitive, “Boeing focused on speed instead of rigor, cost-control instead of innovation, and efficiency instead of transparency,” Darryl Campbell wrote at The Verge. It also seemed to forget about people. Through Boeing we saw how a company that for decades had safely developed a legacy platform, suffers from the same critical flaws as those building the new ones.
