But memories are short and greed is long, and those who “forget” that every safety reg was written in the blood of others can sleep easy beneath golden parachutes and very good lawyers.
Honestly, best thing Boeing could do now is rename it the “737 MAX Fight Club Pinto”, fill it with all the incels who didn’t get the joke, and fly the whole crapload off into the great unknown.
Like a lot of tragedies, it's really hard to tell how much the side effects of something like this are attributed to the mistake itself and how much can be explained through modern communication networks (social media) amplifying everything.
Is the Boeing mistake really that bad, or is it because this is the first such aviation design mistake to happen in our post-2010 everyone-is-online world? Remember that the tails on 737s used to just...fall off back in the '90s.
For the record, I don't think the 737 MAX should have ever been cleared to fly with the current version of MCAS. But I can't help but believe that there had to be some boneheaded designs in the past that cost hundreds of lives that we just don't think about today.
In any case, I hope Boeing has learned from this and revised its engineering processes to go back to its previous prestigious roots. I also hope against hope that we will finally see some executives go to prison for approving this.
The irony is that the level of safety we enjoy today is the result of processes and procedures written in the blood of thousands of accident victims from more cavalier times. Boeing's actions go against everything the aviation industry has learned about safety, which why their misconduct is so egregious.
Let me remind you of why we're all still talking about Boeing.
Not once, but TWICE, software taking readings from faulty sensors caused the airplane to nosedive into the ground, killing every single person on board, with the pilots powerless to take over.
It happened once, Boeing and the U.S. government reassured everyone that it wasn't going to happen again, then it happened again.
When nations around the world began to issue emergency orders to ground the 737 MAX, the U.S. was the last to do so.
The leaked emails from Boeing indicate clearly that this was not a freak accident, but a product of a corporate culture of irresponsibility and recklessness at Boeing reaching mind-boggling proportions. [0] Here are some quotes from said emails:
"This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys."
"We'll probably have to go to other regulators around the world to Jedi-mind trick them into accepting the FSB findings, but that shouldn't be too hard."
"Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't."
"I still haven't been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year."
> What do people propose? Shut down Boeing?
No. What I propose is what I'm doing; I don't fly on Boeing planes anymore. If I see a flight change to a Boeing plane, I call the airline and demand to be switched to a different flight. It worked once, and I plan to keep doing it.
> Want carriers to just scrap their 737 MAX tails? Right now? That's the same thing as just declaring bankruptcy. The investment in a commercial aircraft takes years of steady use to pay off, and no one in the industry is in a financial position to take that hit.
I don't care what carriers have to do. At this point, I would consider it justice to see Boeing go bankrupt. And I really don't care if every airline that runs Boeing planes goes bankrupt. Companies come and go. Money is made and lost. But human lives cannot be returned and corruption like this can't be allowed to continue.
But that won't happen. What will happen is that the government will continue to bail out all the above, indefinitely. But if enough customers begin showing concern over Boeing, the airlines will purchase their planes less and less, and we can expect things to get better, either with Boeing's demise or its reform.
That second 737MAX crash was full criminal negligence on the part of Boeing. The first crash was caused by bad design, the second crash was caused by Boeing’s choice to do a big PR push to prevent regulatory action and keep the planes in the air. The families should own that company by now.
You cannot avoid mistakes every now and then. At least it had no particular safety issue and is quite a reliable aircraft, and they still made money with it. This is nothing like the issues Boeing is facing.
Boeing has plenty of business. 737 MAX sales may suffer, but that will not kill the Boeing Company.
Aviation is a deadly serious business. Design is done by people, which are highly flawed cogs in the system. The system was broken. (meaning design, verification, and certification process). The system can be fixed.
Incompetence at some levels; perhaps. Not murder and not criminal behavior.
Given a crew that has experienced an AOA sensor failure during MCAS operation in the simulator, I would fly on a 737 MAX as it was delivered. Without concern.
I would actually still place this failure directly at Boeing's feet.
Games like the ones Boeing was trying to play (overhauling an entire aircraft without having to change type rating and retrain pilots) directly lead to situations like this. Yes, the FAA / NTSB should have been more effective, but regulatory capture like this is common. It's ultimately Boeing's job to manage the risk: losing 2 airframes in a matter of months because pilots weren't trained on the aircraft as a result of Boeing's mismanagement has done catastrophic damage to their reputation that will take decades to repair. They will now be under a microscope for everything they do, which means they can't use a lot of the less risky cost-cutting they were likely doing before.
The net result of Boeing's machinations to keep the 737-Max at the same type rating led directly to a situation where pilots were not sufficiently trained in the functionality of the aircraft. So I have zero sympathy for the view that Boeing is not entirely responsible for this situation.
The first crash can be compared to the Challenger shitshow. It was a (massive) engineering mistake, which lead to the Lion Air plane crashing. Looking at the history of the 737 in general and the 737-MAX specifically it was rekless, but I'm pretty certain not intentional or foreseen by Boeing.
That massively changed by the fact that they didn't immediately pull the plane after this crash and went into deep analysis mode to really evaluate the cause. Instead they smeared everybody but themselves, developed a completely useless checklist without really knowing or (apparently) caring if it's useful at all and let that deathtrap fly.
The second crash, in my opinion is corporate mass murder for profit. Maybe not legally, but morally most certainly.
It's not necessarily terrible. Boeing obviously has a strong financial interest in safety. The Fight Club theory of managing an acceptable number of fatal mistakes really doesn't hold for the airline industry, because their failures are large and public, because people are inherently afraid of air travel, and because the investigation of plane losses tend to produce far more definitive results than car crashes.
This investigation seems to be turning against Boeing. They will survive, but it almost definitely will cost them far more than whatever they saved by cutting corners. There will also be changes to the certification process, and non-US authorities will take a hard look. Any new incident would become an existential risk for Boeing.
It's important to remember that a company like Boeing isn't a single person. People working on the certification process would usually have incentives that differ from the company as a whole: they do not individually reap the benefits of cutting corners, but bear the brunt of any mistakes, including moral responsibility, possible criminal charges, and an end to their careers.
Such schemes are employed in many industries. Usually, corporate structures and cultures prevent the sort of top-down pressure that people imagine being at play here. Threatening your safety engineers (fire marshals, data protection officers, etc) with job loss for doing their job would result in whistleblowers and lawsuits. It will be interesting to see how exactly this failed at Boeing.
I know the mistake was very costly and we are talking about lives here. But, come on.. is there a chance people are over analyzing. We can try hard and do everything right and still something can go wrong.
They are humans and the airplanes from Boeing have been very very very reliable. It's not like every max 8 dropped from the air. A lot of them, most of them flew alright. I know the people who lost their lives paid a big price but, in hindsight everyone has an opinion.
How unfortunate the certification process for a safety-critical system simply has to be designed such that one bad actor can cause so much damage. And I'm sure he was motivated purely by spite for the FAA and potential 737 MAX passengers - not at all by management that prioritizes speed and cost reduction above all else. What a terrible, very bad individual.
Oh well. At least we know that nobody else at all in Boeing was responsible in the slightest. Everyone else involved with the program were probably angels and this one bad bad man pulled the wool over their eyes. So sad. At least they caught the only bad man before he could strike again. Did I mention he's solely responsible for this whole thing yet?
It really was unfortunate, but these things just happen you know? I guess we just better cross our fingers and hope real hard that it doesn't happen again. There's nothing more to learn from this.
Not to take the easy pun here, but by making this decision and ones like it, someone at Boeing did make a killing. Or 346 killings, more precisely. The same culture and internal processes that allowed this to occur are the exact same ones that let the MCAS design flaws get through, and I will forever be furious that Boeing as an organization was not ripped into parts for that failure.
Out of the 11 hull losses, only 3 resulted in fatalities, one of those was a test flight, one was the famous Air France crash, and one was probably due to the pilot being surprised by somatogravic illusion during go around. All of this in the past 25 years.
The 737 MAX crashed twice in the past six months, I supposed based on this track record we should just close Boeing down altogether?
Not to mention that it was a fraud to begin with, trying to skirt pilot-training rules by having (monumentally incompetent) software tweak the controls of a perverted airframe design to make it imitate previous 737s.
If they had done what they needed to do and designed a new plane from scratch, those people wouldn't be dead.
OR if they'd simply acknowledged the changed characteristics of the plane, struck deals with purchasers to subsidize training expenses, and let pilots fly it themselves... those people wouldn't be dead.
Boeing's recent behavior, as reported by this article, warrants further disgust and ought to be featured in the mainstream news.
I spoke to someone who works there about a year ago.
I was trying to gauge how an insider viewed the Max problem related to the auto trim issue which caused two airplanes [1][2] to crash, killing 346 people. This was shortly after watching the documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing [3].
The ignorance and non acceptance of fault made me cringe. I won't go into the details, but this wasn't a freak accident this was due to human decisions. They cut corners on how to modify an aircraft to compete with Airbus, and then doubled down to not pass down training to pilots on their hack of a fix, since it would be an increase in costs on their customers (i.e. the plane becomes more expensive to operate due to extra training for pilots).
I am doing my outmost to avoid any new planes from Boeing (higher risk with new airplanes). I've also simply started flying less.
The Boeing fiasco is what 2nd world / 3rd world corruption looks like in the west. profit interests above safety, and regulatory capture of the FAA. Also anti competitive or anti free trade practices by the US Department of Commerce [4].
I've gone from admiring Boeing all my life to completely not trusting anything today's Boeing says after this scandal.
It's very likely that they are overrun by a bunch of MBA-ridden suits rather than engineers (not claiming all engineers are benevolent but that cultural shift always results in an erosion of quality), like most companies of its type. And no good decisions will be made.
I have always said (although without any supporting data), that the safest time to fly is probably after a plane crash because most airlines are probably double and triple checking their planes to be safe.
But that's not true of the 737-MAX. You can't fix what they've screwed up. Because the fundamental design change was borne out of greed, and not good engineering. I'll continue to avoid the 737-MAX like I'm sure many others will.
But memories are short and greed is long, and those who “forget” that every safety reg was written in the blood of others can sleep easy beneath golden parachutes and very good lawyers.
Honestly, best thing Boeing could do now is rename it the “737 MAX Fight Club Pinto”, fill it with all the incels who didn’t get the joke, and fly the whole crapload off into the great unknown.
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