Boeing’s second Starliner spaceflight mission to the International Space Station has astronomical stakes
The striking difference in the performance of the two space programs so far would seem to validate that conclusion. But the company rot began long ago, in other places. To understand just how far Boeing has fallen and why, it’s instructive to go back to a time when its reputation was being built, to flashes of intuitive genius in a company that did, literally, change the world.
Schairer was a legend himself, often irascible with lesser wits, able to look at the outlines of a new jet and immediately detect potential flaws. The striking point to me was how personalized Boeing’s intellectual capital was.
All the flaws in the 737-MAX stem from the attempt to take that airplane, whose limits are set by its origins in the 1960s, and push it into one more upgrade. And now, even though the 737-MAX has been allowed back in the air, those limits are still raising serious issues of safety. The problem is that, apparently, there is no way that the 737 cockpits can be retrofitted with a completely new digital alert system. This was explained to me by an expert with long experience of Boeing jets and the evolution of their cockpit technology: “To achieve that kind of generational change requires the aircraft to have a digital backbone, and digital capable systems and sensors. That is not possible in the current 737 design.
What Calhoun didn’t talk about was something that he believes offers Boeing the chance to escape in one leap from the morass of engineering cockups to a new way of building airplanes. When Boeing won the contract to provide the U.S. Air Force with a new trainer, T-7A, a lot of the credit went to an innovative design regime named model-based system engineering, or MBSE.
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