dik said:
Brian... DEI success occurs when you no longer recognise groups and the society is all as one
I agree with treating everyone respectfully and recognizing their skills regardless of color or creed. The nonsense of claiming DEI policies or programs making products or processes lower quality or dangerous comes up again and again in comments. That ugliness was thrown about with the FIU overpass tragedy (Denney Pate), the Titan submersible tragedy (Stockton Rush), Boeing 737 MCAS (Dennis Muilenburg and Kevin McAllister) and now it is being bandied about for the Boeing 737 plug door failure (Dave Calhoun).
Denney Pate, highly lauded and recognized bridge engineer, Stockton Rush, aeronautics engineer, both let their ego-focused goals blur their sensibilities. Muilenburg and McAllister are highly degreed aeronautics engineers with years of experience and worked their way up through the industry, real insiders yet they either mandated changes at Boeing to meet financial goals and promises and got caught flat-footed with the MCAS failure or they were overconfident of their previous successes and chose to allow shortcuts to be taken. The failure of MCAS was not driven by any DEI hiring policy - it was the guidance from the head offices was flawed.
Dave Calhoun said he would change the management message after taking over the Boeing CEO position and maybe he has, maybe he hasn't but he and his team will be scrutinized through this plug door failure.
This claimed DEI poison gets put out there before a root cause has been determined and strikingly, in almost every case cited - the failure or tragedy was lead, controlled and/or designed by a well-degreed, generally well-respected, highly capable middle-age white male. I am not pointing out 'white male' to vilify them, I am pointing it out because those that claim DEI is the root of engineering failure miss the elephant in the living room. The failure mode generally has been a combination of additive failures in the design or system and some level of ego-driven blindness by the principal engineer. Quality and safety haven't been compromised because DEI policies possibly changing the cultural mix of the staff or workers or creating less capable people/staff. The failure or lapse of quality have occurred because either symptoms were ignored or disregarded, or financial pressures or motivations lead to decisions that proved bad.
Good points have been noted on the plug door, its retention fasteners, and the airplane pressurization sensors and warning system. At this point, I don't think it has been definitively determined if the four (4) lock bolts were not installed (though almost certainly they were not in place), or which party left them uninstalled (Boeing, Spirit, Alaska Airlines). The airplane pressurization system warning more than likely was related to the improper closure of the improperly retained plug door but with the plug door covered with an insulated interior panel would it be obvious the plug was the leak point? For a system the size of a commercial airliner how does a maintenance team track down a pressure fault? Maybe the
altitude restriction step taken by Alaska until the pressurization fault could be determined is not unusual or reckless to those in the industry? Certainly, in 20/20 hindsight it seems less than perfect.
Then Elon Musk weighs in with his opinion and as the world's richest man, he obviously must know something, and all the Musk sycophants get repeating the same bad belief. He is a very successful business man and has done some things very well and others poorly. I am not a rabid supporter of mandatory DEI but for me Elon Musk's DEI statements show he is missing the engineering truth and has a weakness of character.
