Boeing submissions for 737 MAX certification are incomplete, need reassesment, FAA says

Do you really think Congress has the competence to tell Boeing how to design an airplane so as to improve flight safety?!

The old joke about the Boeing/McDonnell Douglas merger was that Boeing got McDonnell Douglas' management and Boeing's engineers. They promptly kicked the engineers out of upper management. Now we can see the results of that and the demands for higher and higher dividends for the stockholders.

CEOs and Accountants don't do engineering. Also, don't forget that what "we all can see" is limited to what the media chooses to reveal to us and is possibly affected by omission, fabrication, distortion, error, etc.

Those who report the technicalities about the 737 MAX and the two crashes usually have little to no competence in aeronautical engineering and use "common sense" to understand, explain and analyze complex concepts and issues; whereas it typically takes many years of specialized education in numerous supporting fields of science and technology and years of experience for professionals to do so. The resulting explanations, analyses, etc. are likely to be flawed, but being written in common sense, they appear sensible to those who only have common sense—and nothing more advanced. And what is sensible is often presumed to be valid and true. And that's how the vast amount of "sensible rubbish" about the 737 MAX originated and proliferated, with the vast majority of us not competent enough to realize that our understanding of the airplane and the accidents as gleaned from the media is almost entirely false.

They were found liable, not negligent. Although it may not matter to you, there IS a difference in meaning. In fact, Boeing found the cause after an occurrence that didn't end fatally and the pilot was able to recall in detail what he experienced and the servo actuator wasn't destroyed. They found that an in-rush of very hot hydraulic fluid with gritty contamination of a certain size into an extremely cold servo valve could cause the valve to jam and/or reverse. The failure was not initially observed on the test rig, but predicted by an engineer who happened to look at a printout of the hydraulic fluid flow of the valve under test and noticed an anomaly in the flow values that seemed to indicate that the valve would malfunction if the numbers got worse. So he exaggerated the test conditions on the test rig… and triggered a reversal. The NTSB was about to report that the cause was a servo valve malfunction that could not be verified, but held off while Boeing analyzed the details of the valve operation to validate the failure mode. Then they amended the previous accident reports to include the servo valve abnormal operation as the cause.

To believe that engineers would try to hide a known deficiency in design when that deficiency will become apparent in service and possibly cause loss of life is to believe that engineers are idiots who can't project what will happen in the near future or immoral wretches who don't care—a daft notion, but apparently one held by many news reporters and commenters. I suspect it is an unwitting projection of their own paucity of integrity and apathy for what they produce—a substitute for factual knowledge while speculating without basis.

Why would corporate USA strive for perfection when consuming America settles for the cheapest price junk made abroad?

Dude, chill out. This is just a news forum for people interested in aviation, not the Pentagon War Planning Room.

737 a 1960s designed... A320 1980s... 737 MAX? lipstick on a pig