Boeing is full of very clever people and I seriously doubt any of them take the potential loss of life that may come from any of their decisions lightly. So how have we come to what, admittedly with hindsight, seems like an inherently dangerous situation built upon a number of questionable decisions: the extension of a design over 50 years old that introduces a known risk, trying to negate that risk with an automated system that directly affects the aircraft’s flight without the ability to lock it out and the reliance on one sensor for input and enforced response.

Know a guy who knows a guy. Met this guy right about the time everyone was grounding their 737 MAX flights. My buddy asked his buddy "So what the hell's going on?" because, you see, my buddy's buddy is a Boeing avionics engineer.

The Boeing avionics engineer rolled his eyes and said

"You have to understand that everything in the MAX program is driven by Southwest and Southwest refuses to pay for retraining. Therefore the MAX was launched with no retraining requirement."

If there's no retraining requirement, the flight characteristics of the plane cannot be demonstrably different than the flight characteristics of the plane it's replacing. For the flight characteristics to be the same, even though the plane is different, there has to be automation that makes it the same. The automation that makes it the same has to be certified. And Boeing certifies itself.

I'll bet their model says that a malfunction is a six-sigma event. That's what Bear Stearns said about the market inversion that killed them.