Why Did Boeing 737 MAX Fail?
When the Sales Pitch Overrode the Software
📜 What Happened
To match Airbus without a costly new design, Boeing bolted bigger engines onto the 60-year-old 737 frame and wrote software (MCAS) to mask the changed flight behavior — then, to preserve the 'no new pilot training required' sales promise, largely omitted MCAS from pilot manuals. MCAS took input from a SINGLE sensor. Two crashes — Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian 302, 346 dead — five months apart, as pilots fought software they hadn't been told existed. The fallout: a 20-month grounding, criminal settlements, and the engineering giant's culture on trial.
☠️ The Fatal Mistake
A marketing constraint ('no simulator training') became an engineering requirement — and single-sensor dependency plus undisclosed software met the inevitable bad data.
🧠 The Lesson (Free for You)
When sales promises dictate engineering silence, the physics eventually testifies. No cost target outranks a single point of failure in a system that carries people.
📕 The Antidote Book
Bartlett — Social Chain founder, dropout, and host of Europe's biggest podcast — distills hundreds of CEO/athlete/scientist interviews plus his own scar tissue into 33 laws across four pillars: THE SELF (fill your five…
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