Schadenfreude
I found the latest Boeing issue (bad wing root connection design, requiring months more delay for repairs) somewhat comforting. If hundreds of engineers working on the most critical joint in the plane still managed to screw it up, I feel better about my occasional mistakes.
The totally uninformed guess around the office is that the finite-element analysis on the joint didn't match the actual testing. FEA on composites is terrifyingly difficult, so I don't really fault them the error, although I would have thought they would do some destructive testing of limited pieces of the assemblies before they got to this stage of construction. I do think it was stupid to sit on the info for what appears to have been a few weeks at least. It's not like the customers aren't going to be talking about it even if they're not at the Paris Air Show.
The totally uninformed guess around the office is that the finite-element analysis on the joint didn't match the actual testing. FEA on composites is terrifyingly difficult, so I don't really fault them the error, although I would have thought they would do some destructive testing of limited pieces of the assemblies before they got to this stage of construction. I do think it was stupid to sit on the info for what appears to have been a few weeks at least. It's not like the customers aren't going to be talking about it even if they're not at the Paris Air Show.