Jarhyn, this old thread is about the 737 Max 8 crash 5 years ago. Barbos just picked it up, because it had "Boeing" in the title, but there is now a more current controversy surrounding the collapse in manufacturing safety standards across the company. That process began in the late 90s and has gradually reached the point where Boeing's reputation has been shredded by their obsession with cutting costs to the bare bone in order to maximize return on investment for major stockholders. The 737 debacle was part of that, but the company has gone downhill even more since then. Right now, they are scrambling to find any way to repair the damage without giving up their current culture of "shareholder value" dictating strategy. Ironically, it is that very culture that has posed the most serious challenge to the value of shares.
The design of the 737 Max was highly flawed--a very different type of aircraft kludged onto an old airframe that wasn't suited for the weight of the jumbo fuel-efficient engines. What I think you miss about the simulator issue, possibly because of your tendency to filter everything through your experiences with software engineering, was the root cause of the problem--competition with Airbus. Boeing won the footrace and grabbed market share by rushing a new model of aircraft into production too quickly. That was the reason for using an existing airframe rather than taking the time to design, test, and manufacture a new one. However, the difference between Airbus--a relatively new company--and Boeing--one of oldest aircraft manufacturers still in existence--has been that Airbus standardizes their flight deck (Boeing term for cockpit). Hence, simulators are easier and cheaper to produce for that company. Boeing's practice has always been to "improve" new product lines by building a new internal organization around the manufacture of a new aircraft. Hence, the flight deck and pilot controls tend to be redesigned every time. Standardization is extremely difficult every time you do that. In my 25 years at Boeing, I was involved in a number of new product lines, and I saw effort after effort fail. No matter how hard management tried to promote standards across product lines, they could never quite manage it.
The 737 Max 8 was marketed as having a flight deck that any 737 pilot could handle with minimal training--an attempt to beat Airbus at their own game when they released a new product. Pilot training for a new aircraft is extremely expensive for airlines. That was a lie, but airlines all bought into it, because the aircraft undersold the Airbus competition. Boeing erroneously maintained that new pilots did not need simulator training, and they didn't even have simulators to carry out proper training. That situation has been remedied over the past 5 years, but many other problems remain.
