Catastrophic software errors doomed Boeing’s airplanes and nearly destroyed its NASA spaceship. Experts blame the leadership’s ‘lack of engineering culture.’
Summary
As Boeing workers frantically checked hundreds of thousands of lines of the spaceship’s code, they found a second error – one that would have caused the wrong thrusters to fire after two modules of the spacecraft separated. And then they find bugs, and that’s not extraordinary, but it comes in the backwater of this big debacle of [the 737] Max.” If people had been flying the Starliner, NASA and Boeing officials later said, they would have seen that it had missed a critical engine burn, and could have used manual controls to take over, saving the fuel. Boeing revealed on Monday that its new CEO, Dave Calhoun, could get a $7 million bonus if he fixes the company’s biggest problems, including returning the 737 Max to the skies and launching astronauts for the first time. “While the exact nature of the issues are on unrelated systems, we are taking action across the company to strengthen our safety culture, elevate our engineering focus, improve transparency and rebuild trust,” Friedman said. It’s not yet known whether the spaceship will have to repeat that uncrewed test, but Boeing seems to have budgeted for the possibility: An earnings report released January 29 included a $410 million expense to cover a potential re-do.