Cost & Quality

Someone I met last year mentioned that the reason the 737Max planes went down was because it was coded by developers from a country where there was no aviation engineering experience. This person also went on to say “What else can you expect from people who are paid less than 9$ an hour wage”.

What is evident from this person’s thought is, irrespective of all the experience in aviation, expensive engineers, highly paid directors this crash was a result of a developer who coded as per the specification given not because of the carelessness of the others, in spite of airline industry being one of the hallmarks of safety standards.

Why this kind of thought irritates me is that a lot of people equate cost to quality. If something is not expensive, it is of poor quality. Expensive flights like concorde ran into losses, nobody eats at michelin star restaurants every day even though they are the best in the business.

It is very much possible to reduce cost without cutting quality, recent example I could think of is SpaceX that too in space technologies which is “Rocket science”. If something has failed, it is not necessary that the component of poor quality always costs the lowest.