** Flying Blinded by Indignation **
For the same reason my 16 month old loves to point out every plane in the sky, I’m fascinated by the aviation industry. Skunkworks was the first book I read, and after reading Freedom’s Forge and Losing the Signal, Flying Blind felt like a perfect fit. However, the narrative ends up becoming just another superficial journalist book. Specifically, it suffers from a lack of norming and indignation at satisficing.
Making new airplanes at the level of safety the world has come to expect is hard. Doing it continuously as a large organization is harder still. The 737 Max during its most dangerous period had 2 fatal accidents, a rate of 4/1,000,000, about 20x other 737s (ouch), but still a non-trivial standard to achieve.
Obviously Boeing messed up the rollout of both the 787 as well as the 737 max, but after reading this book I expected a company in shambles trying to pick up the pieces. Instead Boeing’s market cap is still more than Airbus, about 35% off its peak, and roughly the same as it was in 2018. Not a great investment, but not nearly the disaster story painted by the author. The narrative of the teddy bears of Boeing engineering being swallowed up by the hunter-killer drones of McDonnell Douglas would have been enough for a think piece editorial, but I was hoping for more from a book.
** 26th book of 2021 **