“Hey, this isn’t your father’s 737.”

À propos the previous post, wanted to share a 2019 article by Gregory Travis about the two Boeing 737 Max disasters that shook the world in late 2018 and early 2019. It’s titled How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer, and I found it fascinating, well-written, and filled with great details. The Max variant of the 737 was redesigned to allow larger, more efficient engines, but this made it less predictable, which the company decided to paper over in software: The airframe, the hardware, should get it right the first time and not need a lot of added bells and whistles to fly predictably. This has been an aviation canon from the day the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk. Apparently the 737 Max pitched up a bit too much for comfort on power application as well as at already-high angles of attack. It violated that most ancient of aviation canons and probably violated the certification criteria of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. But instead of going…