In the weeks after a Boeing jetliner crashed in the Java Sea near Indonesia last year, killing all 189 people on board, the manufacturer defended the plane’s safety features and publicly resisted calls to make changes to its system and pilot training procedures.Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.This month, following a second deadly crash of a 737 Max, a worldwide grounding of the planes by regulators, a stock slide and the loss of a multibillion-dollar contract, Boeing is taking a new approach. The company invited hundreds of pilots and airline partners to its Renton, Wash., assembly facility Wednesday in a hastily arranged meeting to explain new safety enhancements.Boeing’s shift in tone — CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in a statement this week the company has been “humbled” — reflects growing pressure on the company’s bottom line as its fleet of jetliners sits idle at airports. It also comes as airlines that have placed orders for hundreds of additional 737 Max jets begin to question those investments. Last week, Indonesia’s national airline, Garuda, said it canceled its order for 49 jets because of “consumers’ low confidence” in the airplanes following the crashes.Indonesia's Garuda airlines moves to cancel order for 49 Boeing 737 Max jetsThe Chicago-based manufacturer is working to fulfill orders for more than 4,000 737 Max jets from dozens of airlines, according to analysts at Cowen Washington Research Group.Boeing is responding to rising public concerns about its Max planes in an effort to save the company’s image and prevent the loss of more business, said Shem Malmquist, an active Boeing 777 captain and a visiting professor at the Florida Institute of Technology.“They took a different tack — a tack they should have taken in the first place,” Malmquist said.The company’s changing response may be partly a function of how unusual the situation is, said Seth Seifman, an analyst at JPMorgan.“The way that it took off in the press and on social media is not something that Boeing is used to,” he said. “It probably took some time to put together a public strategy to deal with that.”Boeing has continued to defend the safety of its planes and deflect claims that its automation software may have contributed to either of the two crashes.At the Renton event, officials from the aerospace giant defended the embattled 737 Max as the culmination of 50 years of aircraft development in which they said safety has been the first priority.They also pushed back on the idea that something is inherently wrong with the aircraft development process within Boeing. Company officials also defended the process used to determine that the plane met government requirements. The process used to certify the plane is the subject of congressional inquiries, a Department of Transportation audit and a criminal probe by the Department of Justice.The plane maker has to walk a fine line in its public statements. Admitting that any fault lies in Boeing’s planes, including software, would create legal liability for the company and damage its reputation for safety, said Scott Hamilton, managing director at Leeham Company, an aviation consultant. “Their public statements are completely driven by what their lawyers will allow them to say,” Hamilton said.

Decision makers at Boeing made the following decision which was at the root of the 737 Max crashes.Group of answer choicesNot translating the operations manual in enough languagesTrusting suppliers they had not used previouslyOnly one hour of training was required to transition from the 737 NG to the 737 MaxMerging with the French company Airbus before checking with US based employees

What responsibility did the federal government have in the crash of the Boeing 737 MAX equipped with MCAS?Multiple ChoiceThe FAA had given Boeing wide latitude in judging the safety of MCAS itself.Government programmers had developed the MCAS.The FAA had thoroughly tested MCAS and not found any flaws with it.The FAA had forged the documentation approving the MCAS system.Government bureaucrats had required the installation of the foreign-designed system on the Boeing.

The US government has recently contracted with Boeing to build its fleet of airborne tankers. The project has been laid out with durations (in weeks), predecessors, and costs included:    Activity     Normal Time (weeks)     Crashed Time (weeks)     Normal Cost     Crashed Cost     Predecessor(s)  A 8 5 $1,550 $1,950 -B 8 7 $1,400 $2,450 -C 10 8 $950 $2,350 BD 5 4 $2,300 $2,800 AE 4 3 $660 $1,050 BF 3 2 $600 $1,150 EG 10 6 $440 $1,120 C, D, F What is the critical path of the project? A-D-G B-C-G B-E-F-G If you wanted to shorten the overall duration of the project, which activity would you crash first?  B G C E What would be the weekly crashing cost of the activity you selected in the previous question? (Display your answer to two decimal places.)     Crash the project by 5 weeks. What is the total cost of crashing the project (just the additional cost, not total project cost)? (Display your answer to two decimal places.)

Case for 26 April 2024 Friday Discussion Session: This Must Never Happen Again In December 2022, Southwest Airlines was forced to cancel some 16,000 flights over 4 days following some severe weather conditions in several parts of the U.S. A key issue that prevented Southwest from recovering as quickly as its competitors was the outdated SkySolver software that Southwest relied upon for coordinating equipment, pilots, and crews – it simply couldn’t cope with the level of disruption that occurred. The costs of the debacle were enormous, so the company decided it had to invest in a replacement for SkySolver — one that would be much more fault-tolerant. Assuming you were responsible for delivering the replacement software, and you had 30 experienced software professionals (developers, test specialists, 2 architects, several product managers) committed to the project, how would you organize them and what approaches would you take to maximize the likelihood of good outcomes?

I’ve had it with our business, and most others, being the rule-abiding good guys, while arrogant global tech companies dodge all responsibility for keeping their staff safe and properly paid.Two food delivery riders died in late-September: UberEats rider Dede Fredy and Hungry Panda worker Xiaojun Chen.It’s a tragedy those two men died. But not at all surprising.This is the end result of tech companies’ detached contempt for the people their algorithms control and the societies they operate in.‘The Mario Kart Night Vision Grand Prix’I live near a lot of restaurants.Every night, it’s a scary night-vision driving test, trying not to run over weaving, wobbling food-cyclists.It’s the full Mario Kart experience. All that’s missing are giant banana peels on the road.Those riders are usually dressed in black, with minimal lights and reflectors.If they’ve had any safety training, it isn’t working.They’re steering with one hand, the other tapping away at a handlebar-mounted phone.No time to stop and read their messages because the app gamifies every minute.Coders in California have worked out the optimum blend of digital rewards and threats to keep them moving. If the riders don’t play the game, they earn zero instead of a sweet $6-12 an hour.At best that’s $7 below the minimum wage.It’s a miracle that dozens of delivery riders don’t die every year.‘Just get the job done’Business has come a long way with work safety.As a young audiovisual technician, my job involved hanging 35kg video projectors in hotel ballroom ceilings, directly above the audience, without safety chains. I had to carry them up a wobbly 5-metre ladder, projector in one hand. Good core exercise, but pretty dangerous.Those aluminium ladders were also a great way to get electrocuted when they got among the lighting power cables.Occasionally, projectors dropped from the ceiling onto the tables of dinner guests below. Nobody died, and that was pure luck.Working that same job, I was in the loading dock of a Sydney prestige hotel when three building workers ran in to ask for a tub of ice from the kitchen… to chill down two severed fingers from a worker on the office tower construction site across the road.The hotel people said the ice tub requests came about once a month.Back then, bending safety rules was the sign of a tough, brave worker willing to ‘just get the job done’.Business safety laws have changed, and thank god.We’re conscious of trip hazards, potential electrocution, and the dangers of professional drivers spending 20 hours at the wheel.Your red tape is my personal safetyNow, to hang anything from a ballroom ceiling, our staff need qualifications, the same course construction workers do for crane lifting.It takes them five days and costs us $1,200 each plus their wages.There’s lots more regulation across everything we do. And we try to stay ahead of the curve.We’d rather be too careful to keep our staff safe, instead of basic grudging compliance.Businesses love to complain about red tape.But what is a developer’s red tape is your protection against buying apartments left uninhabitable due to shonky, corner-cutting construction.Red tape is rules that keep fingers attached to their rightful owners.You could argue some safety regulation goes too far.But in the big picture, it gets the safety mentality into people’s minds.If someone’s apprentice kid comes home alive that night because an accident didn’t happen, it’s worth it.No safety netsMeanwhile, tech companies happily expose their ‘contractors’ to industrial revolution-era workplace dangers. And cut away all the financial safety nets.Both UberEats and Hungry Panda said they ‘had offered support’ to the dead riders’ family.They didn’t say if it was financial, or ‘thoughts and prayers’. Either way, it’s discretionary support.We pay workers compensation insurance, like every company.If you die at work, your family gets a guaranteed $834,200 plus other benefits.UberEats expects workers on below minimum wage to cover their own insurance.The tech company mindset is it’s a game-changing strategic move to lower their cost structure, compared to the lumbering dinosaurs of regular commerce.Supporting your staff? Ha! What an outdated business model!Not ingenious disruptionThis is not ingenious disruption. It’s the same as Donald Trump saying “that makes me smart” when he was called out on paying zero income tax.It’s screwing the rest of the community they operate in.Delivering via roads they didn’t help pay for. Safely protected by police they’re not paying for either.The money you pay UberEats ends up in their Bermuda ‘headquarters’, via the Netherlands. Read about the Dutch Sandwich if you’re interested in tax scams, because they all use it.You and I, the local taxpayers, are picking up their tab.Oh, and despite the exploitation, UverEats is still losing a tonne of money. It lost US$232 million last quarter.It’s not even good at business.Why is it seen as any kind of business role model?Time to introduce these tech giants to the same regulation the rest of us deal with.