Dangerous option
Published in DAWN on July 01, 2025
THIS is with reference to the editorial ‘Air India tragedy’ (June 15) which stated that Boeing had reached an agreement with the United States Justice Department to pay $1.1bn to avoid prosecution for the two widely reported 737-MAX crashes. Boeing has a history of trying to cut costs, and for this purpose it outsourced to Indian engineers the development of its 737-MAX planes, paying them only nine dollars an hour because their American engineers would have charged $35-40 an hour, as reported by IndustryWeek, which quoted Mark Rabin, a former software engineer.
Rabin, while talking about Indian engineers’ lack of competence, said: “The coders … were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code. Frequently, it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”
Also, an Indian company, Hindustan Computers Ltd (HCL), played a major role in the development of the 787 Dreamliners, one of which crashed recently less than a minute after take-off from Ahmedabad.
The teams investigating the crash should seriously consider all the relevant background while looking into the incident.
Shakir Lakhani
Karachi
https://www.dawn.com/news/1921317/dangerous-option
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