The 737 MAX Tragedy
I’ll start with three stories from my time at McDonnell Douglas and Boeing. Sometime in the 1980s, a well-placed colleague explained to me that “this executive at GE” had figured out that his job wasn’t to make things; it was to sell them. So he off-shored production and vastly increased profits. My friend also explained to me that our CEO, Sandy McDonnell, had become a fan of this executive and his methods. I don’t remember the name, but looking back on it, I assume he was talking about Jack Welch. One Sunday, early in 1997, a McDonnell Douglas Senior Technical Fellow came into our church late. He’d stayed in his car to listen to the announcement that Boeing was buying McDonnell Douglas. He was grinning from ear to ear. “Maybe they’ll come in and straighten out the screwed up management at this place,” he said. At the end of October, 2018, a day or two after Lion Air 610, a nearly new 737 MAX, crashed, news reports said that an imp...