In my experience, large corporations that want to get away with breaking the law have a structure something like this:
* An "everyone was doing it, and everyone knew" layer of junior employees aged 20 or so.
* An obfuscation layer, comprised of several levels of middle manager who regularly shift roles, companies and countries.
* An "I had no idea this was going on, and would have stopped it if I'd known" layer. This is the CEO and suchlike.
If the criminal behaviour comes to light, the top-layer employees pretend not to have known about it; the bottom-layer employees say (accurately) that everyone was doing it and they thought it was normal; and the middle layers split themselves between the two, relying on forgotten e-mails, miscommunications, and placing the blame on people who aren't around any more.
This works for some things, but not for everything
If it was your job to tighten the bolts and you didn't, that's one easy slam dunk coming your way. And they're right.
Any engineer with AoA failure information (which I assume in Boeing is an easily obtainable information) should have designed/reviewed/approved MCAS in a different way.
> Any engineer with AoA failure information (which I assume in Boeing is an easily obtainable information) should have designed/reviewed/approved MCAS in a different way.
Hell, I'm not anywhere close to aviation, just have an interest in it, and even I know that AoA sensors are prone to failure (relatively, for an aeronautics component), can easily get blocked by external stuff, and multiple crashes and accidents have happened due to that. It's nothing short of criminal negligence to design a system using only one.
That's why aviation has very strict reporting and documentation requirements, everything should be traceable. Of course Boeing failed at that too, with them being unable to say e.g. who actually worked on the famous missing bolts. Send them all to prison for egregious negligence, and maybe the other workers will start refusing to do subpar and deadly work.
* An "everyone was doing it, and everyone knew" layer of junior employees aged 20 or so.
* An obfuscation layer, comprised of several levels of middle manager who regularly shift roles, companies and countries.
* An "I had no idea this was going on, and would have stopped it if I'd known" layer. This is the CEO and suchlike.
If the criminal behaviour comes to light, the top-layer employees pretend not to have known about it; the bottom-layer employees say (accurately) that everyone was doing it and they thought it was normal; and the middle layers split themselves between the two, relying on forgotten e-mails, miscommunications, and placing the blame on people who aren't around any more.