The Boeing 737 Max crisis goes way beyond software
There is no small complexity in the task of carrying hundreds of people through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour.
More than 100,000 airliners take off and land each day, but two deadly air crashes in six months have shocked passengers, regulators, and industry alike.
Crashes of Boeing’s 737 Max in Indonesia and Ethiopia offer a window into all that complexity. Boeing and its CEO Dennis Muilenburg want the story to be simple: a software problem that can be fixed with a quick patch.
But that doesn’t capture the mistakes made by Boeing and American aviation regulators in certifying the plane to carry passengers.
By now, you may well have heard of MCAS, software that automatically pitches 737 Maxes downward to avoid stalling in mid-air.
It exists only b...
