Boeing’s push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

Aviation authorities have weighed in on how Boeing engineers failed to anticipate pilots’ reactions to a cacophony of alerts from misfiring flight control software, how managers pressured engineers to speed the completion of their designs, and how an acquiescent FAA missed the deadly risk from software changes made late in testing. But the most fundamental breakdown at Boeing may have been a lack of appreciation of how humans respond under stress—both in the machine it was designing and in its own organisation. On aircraft like the Boeing 777, a cadre of pilots had worked closely with engineers to solve problems. By the time the Max entered development, Boeing was pushing hard to turn the unglamorous but all-important business of customer training into a profit centre of its own. <br/>